


2.17 Bridges

by William_Easley



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: F/M, Ghost Town, Legends, Monsters, Romance, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-16 04:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 41,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11821113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley
Summary: An isolated wilderness spot, a water feature called Ghost Falls, a Murderer's Branch, a deserted ghost town, and a Death Bridge--the perfect spot for Wendy to take Dipper and Mabel on a relaxing weekend camping trip. Oh, wait, that's not right.





	2.17 Bridges

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Gravity Falls or its characters, the property of the Walt Disney Company and Alex Hirsch. I write only for fun, because I love Alex Hirsch's creation and his people and, I hope, to entertain other fans; I make no money from my fanfictions.

**Bridges**

**By William Easley**

**(Late July, 2014)**

* * *

 

**Chapter 1: Ghost Falls**

The valley and town of Gravity Falls were both named for the hundred-plus foot cataract that poured over the rim of the surrounding bluffs. It was the source of the lake and the main branch of the winding river.

However, Roadkill County boasted nearly a hundred waterfalls, some of them barely more than rapids, others not as impressive as Gravity Falls Falls, but still scenic. Wendy suggested that she take Dipper and Mabel on another camping trip, this one a real camping expedition, not just an overnight tent stay in the bonfire glade, to see a special waterfall.

"I know what would be great, dudes," she said that Thursday morning in late July. "Go with me tomorrow to a place I know. It has a fantastic view of Ghost Falls, and the whole place is pretty, and you can explore the Death Bridge." They were ready to open the Shack, and she sat on her stool behind the counter, her feet propped up and her arms bent, hands behind her head. That morning she wore a red plaid flannel shirt, plus the fur trapper's hat that she and Dipper regularly swapped around every summer and fall.

"Where is this place?" Dipper asked, pausing in his job of polishing the eyeball glass.

"It's a high grassy hilltop called Chílwitwapsúx Meadow."

"The chill with a what now?" Mabel asked, holding her feather duster and turning her head nearly sideways to give Wendy a popeyed look of puzzlement.

"And, uh, those names? Ghost Falls? The Death Bridge?" Dipper asked. The eyes in the jar spun around as if watching to see what Wendy would say. Dipper suspected they could lip-read.

Wendy yawned. "Mabes, the name of the hill's an old Indian name—'scuse me, that should be Native American name, I get that from my dad. Dunno what it means. Chílwitwapsúx."

"How do you spell that?" Mabel asked.

"Dunno, I never tried. Dip, about the other names: The bridge is probably called that because the timbers aren't safe. It's long abandoned. It's a rickety ancient covered bridge—you know what that is?"

"Well—sure," Dipper said.

"I think I do," Mabel added. "It's like a wooden bridge with a roof over it, right?"

"Right," Wendy said. "Looks kinda like a long stretched-out house across a river or creek. This one was built like in 1870 or some deal, 'cause there used to be a little mining settlement back in the hills, called Plenty. It's a ghost town now—"

"Ghosts?" Mabel asked. "Do they jump off a cliff or something? Is that Ghost Falls?"

Dipper rolled his eyes. "Mabel, a ghost town is just an old deserted town. There aren't any real ghosts in it. Uh—right, Wendy?"

"Not as far as I know," Wendy said. She put on her Summerween expression of pure evil. "But then again, anything could lurk there in the shadows! Bwah-hah-ha!"

"Ha-ha," Dipper laughed, weakly.

Wendy gave him a playful shoulder punch. "Ghost Falls is called that 'cause when the sun hits it right, it looks like there's a ghostly figure standing just behind the water, or maybe under it, like a dead-white ghostly person takin' a shower. But what I like about it is it sends up spray that creates the most beautiful rainbow you ever saw."

Dipper chuckled, rubbing his upper arm. "Yeah, that's uh, that's great. But, uh, can you just take off from work to, uh, go camping?"

"Asked Soos already," Wendy said. "I've covered for him, like, ten days already this season when he and Melody had to be away. He says no big deal. Melody can hold down the register in the afternoons while Little Soos has his nap, and Teek says he'll be glad to come in early in the mornings to pick up some overtime."

"Aw," Mabel said, turning back to dusting the Sascrotch, which seemed not to care one way or the other. "I thought maybe he could come with us."

"Mabes," Wendy said with a smile, "you're mine and Dipper's chaperone. If Teek came along, you two would need a chaperone, too. Who'd you want to come with us? Abuelita? Stan?"

"Ummm, that would be a _no_ ," Mabel said. "OK, I guess. And I know Teek would like the overtime 'cause he's saving up for something, so I suppose I'm cool with it."

About that time, the tourists began to trickle in. Soos, in his Mr. Mystery fez, suit, and eyepatch, greeted them and Wendy sold tickets for the Mystery Tour. Soon the place buzzed with visitors. Teek showed up for his shift as short-order cook, Abuelita manned the snack-shop register, and for hours the twins didn't get a chance to talk to Wendy about the trip. Mabel hung out with Teek, and then when he got very busy, she went out to play with Widdles and Waddles, her two pigs.

Dipper headed up to his attic bedroom and fired up his laptop. He couldn't find anything about Chílwitwapsúx, probably because he couldn't spell it, but he did locate a striking photo of Ghost Falls. The caption said the picture had been taken in 1897. The grainy black-and-white image showed the waterfall coming out of a cleft in the woods and spilling over rounded stones for some forty feet or so. The sun striking it did give the illusion of a gigantic, ghostly human figure, head somewhat slumped, arms at its sides. Dipper could even make out the arc of the rainbow, though it was just a bow of white in the old photograph.

He located nothing on "Death Bridge," and he couldn't find an entry on it in a list of "Covered Bridges of Oregon," though pictures of other bridges gave him an idea of what it might look like.

He had a little more luck with "Gold Mines of Oregon." As it turned out, there were a lot more than he'd ever heard of, though the overall gold production in the state was low. He couldn't isolate one near Ghost Falls, though, or any mention of a settlement called Plenty.

So, he waited and eventually asked Wendy for more details. After the Shack closed at six that afternoon, they went to the office and unrolled Stan's oversized relief map of the Valley. It dated from around 1900 and the heavy paper felt a little brittle with age, so they handled it carefully.

The old mining camp—"Plenty"—showed up as a minute dot on the side of a low, smooth mountain. Curving around the foot of the mountain lay "Big Bow Slough," and flowing into that was "Murderer's Branch." "OK, Ghost Falls is the headwater for Murderer's Branch, and the bridge is across that creek that runs back out on the east side," Wendy said. "Along in . . . let me see . . . 'bout there. The campin' place is on this broad hill here. There's a spring that comes out right about here—good water, too—and it flows down the hill and into the creek."

"Wait, now," Dipper said. "Murderer's Branch?"

"What's a slowph?" Mabel asked.

"Sloo," Wendy said, correcting her pronunciation. "Just means a swampy marsh. This one's basically a shallow beaver pond. Dip, there's a story that around 1865, three miners discovered gold in the area, flakes and nuggets in the creek bed. They staked a claim and started a mine, but when they hit a pretty good-sized lode, one of them went nuts or some deal. One night he bashed in the heads of both his partners, and then he claimed that some hostile Umatillas had attacked them in the dark and killed the other guys."

"Whoa," Dipper said. "Was he caught?"

"Well, sort of. See, he'd murdered his partners with a stone tomahawk. He might've got away with it, too, but as the years went by, he started having terrible nightmares of them coming for him and finally confessed and even produced the tomahawk, which he'd kept all that time. He'd sold his interest in the mine before he confessed, and other folks had come in and were mining into the mountain, chasin' that lode of gold."

"How big a load?" Mabel asked.

"L-O-D-E," Dipper spelled out. "It means a—"

"I know what it means," Mabel said. "It's like a vein of gold buried under the ground."

Wendy nodded. "Anyhow, by that time, the little settlement of Plenty down at the foot of the mountain was a going concern, and the people picked out a guy to be their judge, tried the miner, and hung him from a tree on the bank of the creek right where he'd killed the other two. That gave the creek the name of Murderer's Branch. Anyhow, that's what my great-aunt once told me."

"Has, uh, anybody run into the actual ghosts?" Dipper asked. "Lately?"

"Nope," she said. "Not that I've heard of. My dad and my brothers and me have camped on the meadow lots of times. No spooks, just the usual Gravity Falls Valley strangeness. You know, glow-in-the-dark frogs, mutant two-headed woodpeckers, somethin' real quiet that leaves great big naked human-like footprints in the mud around the slough. Normal stuff." She scratched her nose and added, "'Course, we never tried to cross the bridge and never went into the ghost town."

Dipper took a deep breath. "And your dad's OK with your being away from home for the weekend?"

"Yep," she said. "Got that covered, too. He's taking the boys up into Washington to visit a lumber camp there—Junior's working at it as a foreman—so they're gone from this evening through next Tuesday. I've got the house in good order, all the laundry's done, pantry is stocked, so Dad's cool with leaving me behind. 'Course he probably thinks I'm working at the Shack. I don't tell him everything."

"Good strategy!" Mabel pronounced.

"OK, then," Wendy returned. "Now, look—this is a little more strenuous than the backyard camping we've done. Closest we can get to the site by road is just about here on the map. So, it's gonna be a three- or four-mile hike through the woods to get to the meadow. We pack in everything we'll need for the weekend. Backpacks may get heavy, dudes! I think when you see the place, though, you'll love it. If we get good sunny mornings, with that big old rainbow glowing, Ghost Falls looks like something out of a fantasy story."

"Ooh!" Mabel said. "I've got a great rainbow sweater to wear!"

"It's settled," Wendy said. "We'll start off tomorrow early. While I was at the counter, I made out a list of provisions you guys could pack. Dip, you get permission from Stan, OK? Soos said I could take you both if he says it's all right." She reached over and rubbed his neck. "And don't look so worried!"

The instant she touched him, their strange semi-telepathy kicked in, and he felt, rather than heard, her reassurance. _You'll be with me, Dip. You know I won't let anything bad happen to Mabes. Or you. And you'll see why I love the woods so much. It'll make us closer._

_Well . . . OK. But that creek name bothers me. And even the words "Ghost Falls and ghost town."_

_Hey, man, don't sweat it. We've seen worse, right?_

_Right._

Dipper made the call to Grunkle Stan, asked for permission, and an excited Stanley immediately asked, "Wait, what? A gold mine? Can you get me some ore samples?"

"I . . . think it's all played out," Dipper told him. "It's abandoned."

"Try, just in case! Dipper, there are two things you can't get enough of in this world: Gold and more gold. C'mon, just look around for any rock that's yellow and sparkly and put it in a bag and bring it back to me. And remember where you got it! Drive in a stake or something!"

Dipper sighed. "OK, you got a deal."

"Hot tamales! Put Soos on and I'll give him the go-ahead."

They found Soos in the gift shop, tallying up the day's profits, and he spoke briefly with Stan. Then he handed the phone back and gave Dipper a thumbs-up. "It's cool, dawgs. You guys have an awesome good time. Check in with me, though, all right?"

"Up to a point," Wendy told him. "No cell reception way up there, Soos. But I know just about where the signal runs out, so one of us will call you before we start the hike in. Now, don't expect to hear from us from maybe nine tomorrow morning until Sunday afternoon. Don't worry, though, we'll be fine. I've had a lot of experience campin' in that part of the Valley."

"That's cool, then, I guess," Soos said. "Hey, Wendy, since you'll be, like, away on Saturday, you want me to give you this week's pay right now? I can do it in cash instead of a check, 'cause I guess if you guys leave crazy bonkers early, the bank won't be open."

"Nice!" Wendy said. "Thanks, man!"

Soos counted out her pay in twenties, tens, and fives, she signed a receipt and pocketed the cash, and then before she left, she told Dipper and Mabel, "Guys, get your provisions together, fill up your backpacks, and be ready at five tomorrow morning. Sunscreen and hiking shoes, remember! We're off on an adventure."

"Yeah," Dipper said, his voice still nervous. "That, uh, that'll be great."

"Wait, wait," Mabel said, narrowing her eyes in suspicion. "You're trying to tell me there's a five o'clock in the _morning_?"

She could believe in ghosts and demons, but convincing her that yes, there really was a 5:00 a.m. was about the hardest thing that Dipper had ever done.

* * *

 

**Chapter 2: Ghost in the Water**

Because of the camping trip, Wendy let Dipper off the hook as far as their morning run went. "You'll get plenty enough exercise humpin' that backpack up and down hill," she said cheerfully as she and Dipper drank coffee at 4:55 the next morning. Dipper had been gradually decreasing the amount of milk in his coffee, and now it actually looked like coffee instead of some weird butterscotch drink. He still wasn't sure he liked the taste all that much, but it helped wake him up.

"So, where's Mabes?" Wendy asked.

"I went in and shook her a few minutes before you got here," Dipper said. "Told her it was time to get up. She just told me to go away and let her sleep until Christmas. Funny, when it's really Christmas, she always gets me up earlier than this!"

Wendy drained her cup and washed it at the sink. "I'll handle this. You guys packed?"

"Yeah," Dipper said. "I had to unpack Mabel's, though, and put stuff in it that we actually needed. I mean, I don't think we should take twelve skeins of wool and a dozen knitting needles."

"Nope," Wendy said. "Won't have time for hobbies. OK, I'll go and roust Mabel out. You wash up your cup and spoon, then take your packs out and store them in the trunk of my car. Here's the keys." She flipped them to him, and he caught them. "What?" she asked. "You're smiling funny."

"First time you ever really spoke to me," Dipper said. "You handed me the golf cart key and said, 'Try not to hit any pedestrians!'"

"Did I?" she asked. "Huh. Yeah, I think I'd already sorta said 'hi' to you and Mabel, but I guess I was in my terminally-bored teen phase back then. Sweet that you remember, dude! Wait in the car if you want. I'll haul Mabel out in ten minutes."

Dipper carried the two backpacks—and they were heavy—to the parking lot, where Wendy's forest-green 1973 Dodge Dart was parked beneath the sole security light that Soos always left on. The eastern sky already showed streaks of peach-colored light, barred with clouds, but overhead a good many stars still shone. Low to the north, the Big Dipper barely topped the distant bluffs.

Night insects still whirled around the security light, and Dipper heard the faint twittering of bats. He wasn't sure, but suspected, that Gravity Falls harbored one or two vampires—but he also suspected that they had adapted to a diet of insects rather than human blood. Anyway, Mabel had made an offhand remark once that kissing a vampire tasted like licking a moth, and knowing her, she probably had tried both at least once.

He unlocked the trunk and found that Wendy had her own pack already there. He put the backpacks in, then went back for his tent, rolled up into a neat cylinder, and he stored that, too. Then he got into the passenger seat.

It probably didn't take Wendy a full ten minutes to get Mabel up and moving. They came out, Mabel shuffling and drooping, and Wendy opened the back door. "In you go, Mabes. Sack out if you want. We'll have breakfast when we get there."

Mabel got in, snicked her seatbelt, and started to snore. Wendy shut the back door, got behind the wheel, and Dipper handed her the keys. "We can talk," he said. "She once slept through an earthquake."

"I know, right?" Wendy said. "Man, I thought I was lazy!"

"Well, to be fair, you kinda used to be," Dipper said as she started the engine. "When you were about Mabel's age."

"Yeah, I guess so," she said, making a three-point turn and heading down the driveway. "Still lazy, but you can't hardly tell it. I mean, an Assistant Manager has to look busy and motivated! Boosh!"

They reached the end of the drive, and Wendy said, "You an' Mabel and Soos did a real good job on the sign and plantings, Dip. The mountain laurels'll be beautiful next year."

"Teek helped a lot, too," Dipper said.

"Yeah, he's a good guy."

"He'd better be," Dipper said. "I mean, to keep up with my sister."

They encountered zero traffic on the road that early as Wendy took a winding narrow blacktop into the mountains south and west of town. It was an area far enough from the Shack to be new to Dipper—though admittedly he didn't see much scenery, at first because it was dark and then after the sun came up because the tall firs on either side of the route kept them hemmed in.

"How far is it?" Dipper asked.

"Not too far to the spot where we park now," Wendy told him. "Figured we'd have breakfast before we begin the trek. You bring your supplies?"

"Yep," Dipper said with a touch of pride. "Made my own gorp for breakfast: toasted oats, almonds, pumpkin seeds, and just a few raisins. Mixed it with sunflower butter and rolled the patties in crushed wheat cereal."

"Sweet!" Wendy said. "Good mix of protein and carbs, probably about the right amount of fat. You're learning, dude."

"Looked it up on the Internet," Dipper said.

"How about Mabes?"

"Doesn't much matter what she packed," Dipper said. "She'll eat about anything."

They turned off the highway and onto an even narrower and very bumpy dirt track, with occasional wash-outs that jolted the car and tested its shocks. "Old logging trail," Wendy explained. "Probably started out as the wagon track in to the gold mine. We'll park near the covered bridge, but we don't have to cross it. The meadow is three or four miles off to the west."

When they made a long curve and the bridge came into view, Dipper thought that "Death Bridge" was a good enough name for it. Splintered, gray, bare of paint, the bridge was a swaybacked wooden tunnel stretching about fifty feet across a fairly deep gorge with a stream tumbling past far below. The roof had once been covered with cedar shingles, but now half of them had rotted or fallen away. The structure stood on three sets of stone pilings, which didn't even look mortared, but just dry-stacked. On this side, a tree had taken root on the steep bank beneath the bridge, and its gray, lichen-mottled trunk now thrust up right through the bridge and its roof, the planks either broken or warped out of shape.

"Wow!" Dipper said. "What kind of tree—"

"Red alder," Wendy said. "Must be close to a hundred years old. It's a little out of place this far inland, but I've seen 'em before around rivers. Mabes! Rise and shine!"

In the back seat, Mabel muttered, "Go 'way. Wait, where's my room? Have I been abducted by aliens? That'd be so cool!"

"We're going hiking," Wendy reminded her, opening the back door. "Come on! We'll have breakfast, then I'll phone Soos and tell him we're OK. We'll be out of phone range pretty soon."

Dipper brought out his plastic baggie of home-made trail mix. Mabel, though, dug out another zippered baggie full of a muilticolored sweet cereal. "Great thinking," Dipper told her sarcastically. "No milk!"

"Uh-uh!" she replied, smirking. "Watch Mabel perform her food magic!" She opened her canteen, poured water into her own baggie, and shook it. "Voilà, Bro of little faith! The secret is mixing in some powdered milk, plus some freeze-dried strawberries. The breakfast of hiking champions!"

Wendy had brought along a fragrant hard-boiled egg, plus a sandwich of thick-sliced home-made dark bread—"Check it out, multigrain!" with almond butter and banana slices. They spread out a ground cloth on the grass beside the trail and sat there enjoying their breakfast and sipping from their canteens. "Best stay hydrated, guys," Wendy said. "Plenty of good water where we're heading, so you don't have to conserve." Then Wendy collected their garbage and they went a good distance from the Dart and buried the plastic and paper. Wendy dusted her hands. "No use truckin' this into the woods, and if we left it in the car, it might attract bears. Okay, dudes, suit up!"

They struggled into their backpacks and Wendy lashed the tent roll to the top of Dipper's. Wendy inspected them, adjusted the straps—"Nothing's worse than getting chafed before the fun even starts," she said—and wound up by having them tuck their jeans legs into their socks and spraying on some repellent.

"Mosquitoes?" Mabel asked.

"Yeah, but ticks, mostly," Wendy said.

"Yuck! Ticks!"

Dipper felt mildly surprised that Mabel had found at least one living creature that she could not consider cuddly.

Wendy checked her phone. "Yep, just one bar, like I expected. Let me see if I can get through." She punched in the number of the Shack and in a few seconds, she said, "Soos? Hi, it's Wendy. Why is it a surprise? Oh, right, no caller ID on the land line. Well, we're here and we're safe. Yeah, we'll head into the woods and in a few minutes, we'll be out of phone range. Listen: Before we left this morning, on the counter under the eyeball jar I put a sheet of paper with the GPS coordinates of where I park the car and another set of where the campsite is. Huh? Uh, yeah, the one labeled 'CAR' is the parking spot, and the one marked 'CAMP' is—yeah, you got it. Put the paper away somewheres safe just in case, OK? Where would I suggest? Uh, how about beneath the cash drawer in the register? Great. Don't expect to hear from us until Sunday afternoon! Catch you then."

She put her phone away, shrugged as if testing the comfort of her backpack straps, and then said, "Wagons ho!"

"That's not a very nice thing to call wagons," Mabel grumped.

Not too far along the way, Dipper saw why Wendy had been so willing to let him out of their morning run: This cross-country hiking was far more strenuous. Though the ridges and hills weren't spectacularly tall, they were steep, and no visible trail lay beneath the hikers' feet. They had to wind their way through trees, skirt thickets of devil's club, their broad maple-like leaves hiding the nasty yellow thorns that could make you itch for hours. Sometimes they scrambled over bare rock, lightning-struck so often that it was cracked and treacherous, loose underfoot, like marbles scattered on concrete.

And going downhill felt just as bad. The slope made Dipper struggle not to break into a run—if he started, he knew he wouldn't be able to stop before colliding with a tree—and that exhausted him as much as the climbs did. "How can you find the way?" he asked Wendy, gasping.

"Just know it, Dipper," she said. "I mean, Dad and the boys and me have been coming this way for years. I can recognize the trees and all."

"Don't let anything happen to you," Dipper said. "If we got separated, I could never find my way back." He turned. "You OK back there, Mabel?"

"This rainbow better be worth it!" she said from twenty feet behind them.

They briefly rested at the top of the next stony hill, and Wendy reached for Dipper's hand. Mabel had flopped down and wasn't looking at them, so she didn't even make a snarky comment.

Dipper squeezed her hand—and then gasped as a kind of mental map flooded his consciousness. "What are—oh!"

Using their touch-telepathy, Wendy had just given him a copy of her ability to find her way from the bridge to the campsite. Now without knowing how he knew it, Dipper realized that they were close—two more hills to climb, pretty bad ones, and then they'd come out in the grassy area at the foot of the round hill Wendy had called Chílwitwapsúx Meadow.

_Thanks!_

_No problem, Dip. This mind-to-mind stuff can come in handy!_

It took them nearly another hour—the last two hills offered the steepest slopes and the most difficult footing so far—but around ten-thirty or so they emerged into sunlight. The sky overhead, mostly clear blue, had drifts of puffy white clouds. The meadow rose into the rounded hill, and beyond it lay steeper and rockier hills. As they made their way to the summit, Dipper heard water trickling. "That the spring?" he asked.

"Yep," Wendy said. "Just a few feet from where we'll pitch the tent. See the dark gray rocks there? The spring comes out in a small pool, a pretty strong gush this time of the year—I think campers way before us stacked rocks to make a little semi-circular dam and create the watering hole—and then the rivulet runs down that rocky crevice to spill into the creek down there. You can look back up past the marsh there and see the old bridge off in the distance. But closer, right over there, that's the waterfall."

Across from them, Dipper saw the waterfall pictured in the old photo he'd found online. It wasn't huge, but it was beautiful, white water cascading over black round rocks into the swampy beaver pond. And Wendy had been right—the morning sun had produced a perfect, vivid rainbow that arced right across the foot of the falls.

"It's so beautiful!" Mabel said. "Mabel like!"

"Worth the walk?"

"Yeah, it is! And nearly worth you waking me up before it was even light outside! Ooh, Dipper—see the ghost?"

He had not noticed it at first because of the beauty of the place. "Yeah, I see it," he muttered.

A figure that looked like a man with slumped shoulders, appeared to stand beneath the falls—except he'd be about twenty feet tall if he were a man. His hands hung down beside his upper thighs. Except—something about his right hand didn't look quite the way it should—"Oh, my gosh!"

"You see it, huh?" Wendy asked.

"What?" Mabel asked. "Come on, Dipper, what is it?"

"Look at his right hand," Dipper said.

"Huh. Sort of deformed."

"Yeah," Dipper said. "That's because he's holding something."

"A tomahawk, Mabes," Wendy said quietly.

And despite the warmth of the morning, Dipper shivered.

* * *

 

**Chapter 3: In Hot Water**

They set up the tent in less than ten minutes. Not many trees stood around the base of the hill, but Wendy picked out the tallest one, a young bigleaf maple, scaled it, and tossed a thin rope over one branch. Then she came down, packed their food into a bag, and hoisted it up about fifteen feet off the ground. "That'll keep our supplies safe from wild animals," she said. "This is, like, our pantry tree, guys."

Then Mabel asked, "Hey, can we go swimming? We brought our bathing suits, just like you told us."

"I brought trunks," Dipper corrected hastily. "Trunks, I brought."

Wendy chuckled. "Don't think you'd want to, Mabel. The beaver pond is only a couple feet deep in most places, 'cept the deep pool the falls has dug, and it's full of leeches."

"Leeches?" Mabel asked, turning pale.

"Big nasty ones," Wendy confirmed. "Anyway, the bottom is mud that's nearly liquid and must be, like, fifty feet deep. And see that green slimy stretch of ground all around the edge of the pond? Quicksand and mires."

"Q-quicksand?" Dipper asked. "Like in the movies?"

"Like in real life. Don't be scared! It's not as bad as you think. If you get caught in mud, don't struggle, just flatten out on your back. If you float in water, you'll float in gunk. You can even do a backstroke to get yourself out, 'cept you'll only go a few inches in half an hour, so it'll be exhausting and slow."

"No swimming?" Mabel asked, looking pouty.

Wendy shook her head. "No, I asked you to bring your swimming things for another place, but we won't see that until later. Right now, we have chores to do!" She found a folding shovel and handed it to Mabel. "Here you go. Dig us a shallow fire pit right here, three feet across, round as you can get it. Shallow, now, just three or four inches deep's enough. Dipper, you and I will go bring in some firewood. We'll be just over there at the foot of the hill, Mabel. You see any bears or other critters, call out!"

"Aw, bears," Mabel said. "Just like big old fluffy doggies!"

"Not these bears," Wendy told her. "They're big and matted with filth and they stink like nobody's business. But they won't hurt you. Never heard of an actual grizzly in the Valley, and generally a black bear will stay away from you if it's not a mom with a cub or two. If you see one of those, stay away from the cubs, and I don't care how cute they are!"

"By the way," Dipper added, "black bears are brown."

"Garoo?" Mabel asked.

Wendy found and chopped kindling and firewood from deadfalls in the fringe of the woods, and she and Dipper made three trips, hauling in a good supply. "Good job on the fire pit," she said. "Now you guys look around in the grass. You'll find a bunch of scattered river rocks. Those are what we'll use to surround and line our fireplace here. Same ones my family's used over and over, so some of them will be sooty."

It was almost like hunting Easter eggs, except eggs didn't normally weigh five to ten pounds. The twins sweated as the sun grew hot, but before noon they had their fire pit, safe and nicely-fitted with stones. "You guys should be proud of yourselves," Wendy told them. "Let's eat lunch, and then we'll go have some fun."

They had sort of grazed over the last two hours, munching on nuts and chocolate. But they settled down and ate a couple of protein bars and drank water fresh from the spring—"You sure there's no leeches in this?" Mabel asked.

"Or germs?" Dipper added.

"No to both," Wendy assured them. "It's pure enough to drink. We've tested it before."

It was cold and tasted delicious—for water—and they drank it and felt refreshed. Then they did the ritual of tidying up—Wendy took the folding shovel to the base of the hill to bury their trash—and next she opened her backpack and assembled a stubby fishing rod. "Let's go fishing," she said.

"Where?" Mabel asked.

"Right down there in the creek. Not the beaver swamp, but the pool at the base of the waterfall. I'm gonna show you how to catch trout for dinner."

"We're gonna kill them?" Mabel asked.

"Couldn't cook them otherwise," Wendy said. "We're not fishing for sport, Mabes. C'mon, you eat hamburgers and turkey and chicken!"

"And fish," Dipper pointed out.

"But none I'm friends with!" Mabel said.

Wendy shrugged. "Pretend these are marauding trout who're planning to come and attack us in the night," she said. "This is a pre-emptive strike."

"Uh—don't you need a fly-fishing rod for trout?" Dipper asked.

"Ever gone fishing?"

Dipper shrugged. "Well, uh—just on the lake with Grunkle Stan, and we just caught and released some little ones. But when the Manotaurs were teaching me manliness, we grabbed a few right out of the water, and they gobbled them up. I didn't eat any, though. See, the Manotaurs don't bother cook them."

"OK, TMI about the Manotaurs, and no to the fly-fishing rod. Trout will take bait, and I brought some," Wendy said. "This is a little spin-cast rod, and I'm gonna show you how to use it. All it takes is a little bit of skill and a lot of patience."

They made their way down the grassy hill, past the spring—which gurgled into the stone basin, maybe five feet in circumference, and then a few feet down into a lower, deeper, second one, similarly man-made, before becoming the little stream that cascaded over the rocks and into the creek. They stepped across this at the foot of the hill—the soil there was springy and soft, but not muddy—and Wendy led them to the shade of a group of Pacific willows. They were so close to Ghost Falls that the spray sometimes drifted over to dampen them when the wind blew in the right direction.

From here, Dipper saw, the ghostly figure in the falls vanished, lost in the turbulent bubbling white water as the stream struck outcrops of dark rock. And from this angle the rainbow went away, too, much to Mabel's disappointment. "Can we wade, at least?" she asked.

"Sure," Wendy said. "Only go to the left there, OK? I'm going to cast off to the right, where the water's deeper. The pool's clear, so you'll be all right as long as you can see the bottom. Watch out, the rocks are loose. Don't get dumped."

"Yay!" Mabel said. She took off her shoes and socks and stepped into the pool. "Cold!"

"Mountain streams are like that," Wendy said.

She had brought a few things with her—a flat plastic box about as big as a tissue box, plus a canvas bag lined with plastic. "Won't need that until later," she said, setting the bag aside. "If we're lucky."

From the box, she took out a small pair of scissors and a spool of nylon line so fine it was hard even to see. "Gonna make a leader," she said. She picked up something between thumb and forefinger that looked a bit like a metal bead. "Barrel swivel. Know how to tie a palomar knot?"

"Uh—no," Dipper said.

"Touch my arm and let's see how well this works."

Dipper put his hand on her arm and got a flash of understanding. "I think I can do it," he said. He took the swivel from her and the thin line. Concentrating, sticking his tongue out the corner of his mouth like Mabel sometimes did, he doubled the line, threaded it through the eyelet of the swivel, made a simple knot, looped it back around the eyelet, and started to tighten it.

"Good job," Wendy said, stopping him. "But wet the line before you pull. Tightening a dry line weakens it. Here, I'll show you."

Wendy wet her fingers in the pool, then wiped the line and pulled it tight. She then tied on a small treble hook. Finally, before attaching the leader to her line, she threaded on a cylindrical lead sinker above where the swivel would be.. "I know the hook looks small, but it's about the right size for the trout around here. I'm using a two-and-a-half-pound test line, but I've caught trout as big as six pounds on it. What matters is how you handle 'em. Now for the bait!"

She reached into the box and produced a squat jar, about the size of a baby-food container, full of something that nearly glowed in the daylight, sort of a fluorescent yellow-green. It had the consistency of modeling clay, and she scooped out a little of it and made it into a ball. Dipper wrinkled his nose at the strong fishy smell.

"Yeah, it kinda stinks," Wendy agreed with a grin. "But that attracts the fish." She threaded the ball of bait onto the leader, slipped it down, and settled it within the clutch of the three hooks.

"OK," Wendy said. "This is a spin-casting rod, about the simplest kind. Now, we don't want to whip it out—if we do, the bait falls off. Just a real gentle sideways cast right—out—there!"

The baited hook flew out past the turbulence at the foot of the falls and plunked into a calm stretch of water. "Now," Wendy said, settling back, "it's all up to the fish."

Over three hours, they caught five fish in all, including three that were big enough, somewhere between two and four pounds each, and after the first of those, Wendy sank the bag into the shallow water at the edge of the pool. It filled and floated with its rim a few inches above the surface, and she dumped the fish into it. Mabel got tired of wading and came and watched the fish swim around and around, but when Wendy caught the third good-sized one, she said, "There's our supper, guys." She dumped out a good part of the water, and then she and Dipper grasped the handle of the canvas bag and lugged it up the hill, while Mabel carried up the fishing gear.

They released the trout into the lower basin of the spring, where they circled like goldfish in a bowl. "That'll keep 'em fresh," she said. "Let's go get a fire started."

By then afternoon was coming on. They got the campfire going, and after another hour, Wendy arranged three of her campfire potatoes in the ashes to roast, and she broke out their meager cooking utensils: a modest frying pan, a two-tined fork, and their aluminum plates. "Mabel," she said, "I know you won't want to watch me fillet the fish, so you stay here. Want to come, Dipper?"

_Well, if I'm going to eat them—_

"Yeah," he said.

The process wasn't as gruesome as the frog he'd dissected in biology class. Wendy expertly grabbed the fish from the small pool, quickly thumped them behind their heads to kill them, and then opened them, gutted them, and swept a sharp four-inch knife behind their ribs and then behind their spines. She cut off the heads and tails and had a couple of pink, boneless fillets for each fish. She wrapped those in a damp cloth, gathered the offal in a plastic bag for later burial, and they went back to camp.

"Here we go," Wendy said, unpacking two plastic bags full of—stuff. "This one's powdered eggs. Mabel, add water until it's like a loose, sticky dough and knead that until it's smooth. Dipper, this one's crumbled saltines. Crush 'em to a powder."

When that was done, she coated the fillets in the egg mixture and then in the crumbs—"Already seasoned," she said—and fried them up, three at a time, in the skillet.

She served two of the golden-brown fillets to Dipper and Mabel, along with two of the cooked potatoes, and said, "Dig in. I'll do the other three."

Dipper had never tasted fish as good as that, and Mabel, though reluctant until her first experimental bite, ate with enthusiasm. Afterward, Mabel scrubbed the dishes clean, while Dipper went to the edge of the woods and buried their garbage.

"Gotta admit, that was good," Mabel said, burping.

"Fresh is better with trout," Wendy told her. "OK, let's change into our bathing su—I mean swimwear. Me an' Mabes will change in the tent. Dip, you can do it right out here in the open. Nobody to see you."

"Except ghosts," Mabel said.

"Cut it out!"

He got into his trunks, but kept an undershirt on. When the girls came out in their bathing suits—Mabel's a bright yellow, Wendy's a fetching red—Dipper asked, "Where are we going to swim? It'll be dark soon."

"Not gonna swim. It's a surprise. Let's bank the fire, in case the wind comes up, and then grab a flashlight and just follow me."

After Dipper had covered over the fire with a layer of the soil Mabel had dug up, they started downhill again. Wendy led them down on the far side of the spring and then around to an outcrop of the mountain—to an overhang, in fact, nearly a shallow caver, where a round pool steamed. "Hot tub, guys!" she said. "And all natural!"

"Oh, yeah!" Dipper said. "The Manotaurs had one like this!" He peeled off the undershirt.

"You're getting pecs, man!" Wendy said, though she must have noticed that back when they'd nearly fallen victim to Moon Trap Pond. Neither of them had been wearing much for a good part of that time.

"And chest hair!" Mabel added. "Not as much as Grunkle Stan, but a pretty good crop."

"Stop it," Dipper said, easing himself into the water.

Mabel jumped in, but like Dipper, Wendy went in carefully, spreading her long red hair behind her on the edge of the pool. "Don't want to get my hair wet. Too much trouble to try to dry it," she said. She put an arm around Dipper's shoulders and one around Mabel's.

_This is great, Wendy!_

_Yeah, I know, dude. One day when you're older, you an' me will have to come here when it's just the two of us, you know? And not bring suits._

_Please don't get me started!_

_OK, Dip. Sorry!_

The bubbling spring really was like a hot tub—just big enough for all three of them to have plenty of room, just deep enough for them to sink in up to their shoulders (in Wendy's case) or up to their chins (in the twins' case). "Is this first-class or what?" Wendy asked them.

"I don't ever want to leave," Mabel replied with a contented sigh.

Dipper relaxed, letting the hot water steam out his aches and tensions. Nice, really, really nice! Hot tubbing with his Lumberjack Girl—and his sister, too—under a peaceful sky, nothing to worry about, no trouble on the horizon—

Oh, yeah. This was great.

Or at least it started out that way.

* * *

 

**Chapter 4: A Carpetbagger in the Turnip Cellar of Dreams**

"I feel almost too relaxed to walk back up the hill," Mabel said, yawning.

The sun had set, purple twilight deepened, and they had climbed out of the natural hot tub. "Walk up will dry us off," Wendy said. "Come on before it gets cool."

"It's already pretty cool," Dipper said. He laughed, but thought _I'm laughing too long at my little joke_ and broke off into a cough. They went up the hill, an easy climb compared to their trek through the woods that morning, and got to the tent, where a few embers still showed under the topping of soil that Dipper had spread over the fire. Mabel and Wendy went into the tent to change—and tossed Dipper his underwear and a white T-shirt.

"How about my pajamas?" he asked.

"You didn't pack them," Mabel said.

"Huh? Of course I did!"

"Yeah," Mabel said, "but I had to _unpack_ them last night—'cause you took all my knitting stuff out of my backpack, and yours didn't have any room for it until I took a few things out!"

"What? Aw, come on! Am I supposed to sleep in my jeans?"

"Sleep in your shorts, dude," Wendy said. "It's no big deal."

T _hen you sleep in your bra and panties_! Luckily for Dipper, he bit his tongue before saying that. He sighed. "At least toss out a towel."

They did, and he squirmed out of his wet swim trunks, dried off, and got into the underwear and T-shirt. And for good measure wrapped the towel around his waist. When they said they were ready, he ducked into the tent, and Mabel laughed at him in the light of the lantern: "Laddie! That's a verra fine kilt ye got there! Is it the tartan of the Clan MacPines?"

"I thought it was a hula skirt," Wendy said, grinning.

"Come on," Dipper said. "I'm shy, OK?"

"We've both seen you in your undershorts, Dipper," Mabel reminded him.

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean I want to parade around in them."

He turned to unroll his sleeping bag—and Mabel grabbed the towel and yanked it off him. "Yoink!"

"Be that way," he said.

The tent was big enough for them to sleep side by side, Wendy in the middle and the twins flanking her. But they didn't go to sleep right away. Mabel wanted a snack, and grumbling a little, Wendy went to haul down the food cache and find her a chocolate bar. "OK," she said, "but once this is eaten, you're responsible for going down and burying the wrapper. Has to be done."

"Gimme chocolate," Mabel responded. "Nom, nom, nom!"

She made short work of the bar, then without complaining walked to the foot of the hill with the little shovel and disposed of the wrapper. That gave Dipper and Wendy a moment to kiss and wish each other a good night. However, instead of coming straight into the tent, Mabel seemed to pause outside. "Guys?"

"We're asleep!" Dipper said.

"Come and look at this. I'm serious."

"Uh-oh," Wendy said. "I knew it was too good to last." Raising her voice, she asked, "What is it? Not a meteor, I hope!"

"Come and look!"

So, both Wendy and Dipper hunkered out of the tent. "What is it?" Wendy asked again. Full dark had fallen, with a sky so clear that the Milky Way spread its long silvery stain across the heavens.

"I don't know," Mabel said. "Way over there. See it?"

Dipper squinted. "Where?"

Beside him, Mabel said, "Right over there—low, not up in the sky. See it now?"

"You mean the orangey light?" Dipper asked.

"Yeah. What is that, Wendy?"

"I . . . don't know. Looks like it's right where the bridge is."

Dipper ducked back inside and brought out the little pair of binoculars he had packed—and discovered that Mabel had replaced his pajamas and probably some other stuff with four balls of yarn and a couple of knitting needles. He came back out. "These are only eight-power, but let me see if they help." It took him a little while to get the glow into the field of view—and then he saw it was a row of what looked like rectangular windows, lighted from inside by some orange-colored light.

He handed the binoculars to Wendy. "What do you think?"

After a minute, she said, "Mm-hmm. It's the old bridge, all right. See, there's this row of little square windows just under the roof eaves, and we're seeing the light shining through them. I can't figure out why we can't see more light through the cracks and missing board in the walls and roof. It's real dim, though—like maybe kerosene lanterns."

"I think some old bridges actually hung lanterns inside so night travelers could find their way more easily," Dipper said. "But who in their right minds would do that these days?"

"Especially on a dangerous old rickety bridge," Mabel added. "Hey, Wendy—you suppose the car is safe?"

Wendy chuckled. "Yeah, I think so, Mabes. Nobody'd think it's worth stealing. It's practically old enough to collect Social Security! But I wonder who could be over there."

"I don't want to try to walk back there in the dark," Dipper said.

Wendy handed back the binoculars. "Me, either, dude. So, I guess we sit tight here and scope it out tomorrow morning. I don't know—might be some kids out this way exploring, but it's really far off the track for that." She sniffed. "Smell that?"

Dipper followed her example. "I can kinda smell the swampy scent. And—the smoke from our campfire?"

"No, we were burnin' oak, and that has its own scent. This is—" she sniffed again—"this is birch, I'm pretty sure. But it's a long way off, and not dense—no forest fire or anything. More like a fireplace or a wood stove."

"A mystery!" Mabel said.

"One we are _not_ gonna try to solve tonight," Wendy said firmly. "Let's turn in. Anybody wakes up in the night, take the binoculars and check things out. Anybody sees anything weird or suspicious, wake the others."

They turned in. When the lantern was out, Dipper reached out and found Wendy's hand and clasped it.

_Good night, Wendy._

_Night, Dipper. Tomorrow if you want, we might go back and look at the old mining town. From a distance, I mean—I don't want to try to cross that bridge even on foot._

_That'll be cool._

_Lay still just a second._

He felt her shift, she let go of his hand, and a second later her breath came warm against his face. Their lips touched.

_Pleasant dreams, Dip._

_Will be if I dream of you, Wendy._

_Kinda corny, but not bad!_

They didn't try to hold hands as they relaxed into sleep. They couldn't always control their thought transfers, and especially when one or the other or both were slipping into dreams, things could get strange or, frankly, embarrassing.

Tired from the day's hike, relaxed from the hot water, Dipper drifted off listening to Wendy's steady breathing and Mabel's gentle snores—she adamantly refused to admit she ever snored, but Dipper had slept in the same room with her often enough to know the truth.

For a time, he drifted dreamlessly in darkness. Then when he opened his eyes, it was to dappled sunlight, the colors bleached and faded. Something big made a whickering sound close by, and he reached up and moved the Stetson that had covered his face. "Quiet, Wildfire," he said to his palomino. The handsome horse, grazing near his head, whinnied softly.

He sat up and rubbed his chin, the beard bristly under his palm. He yawned and said, "That you, Skunk?"

"Where air ye?"

"In this clump of trees, you numskull. Stop making so blamed much racket. You'll have every Injun in the valley down on us."

A skinny guy with thin, bowed legs, wearing a rough-textured beechnut-colored shirt that looked homemade, pushed through some brush. "Anse here yet?"

"Do you see Anse here?"

"Naw."

"Then that answers your question."

"Where's the jackass?"

"Tied back in the alder grove."

"You don't never tie Wildfire."

"He never runs away."

The other man—somehow Dipper knew his name was Abishack, Ab for short—tied his own horse, a sorrel gelding, to a tree. Behind the horse and tethered to the gelding, a gray jackass, a glum-looking beast loaded with kegs and sacks tied onto his back with criss-crosses of rope, swished his tail and started to graze. Off in the distance you could hear the rush and roar of the waterfall. Ab stretched and scratched himself. "Got the grub."

"Good."

"Assayer says the bag of dust was worth fifty. Got thirty-three and odd cents left."

"We'll divvy it out when Anse meets us," Dipper said.

"He at the works?"

"With his pickaxe. He thinks we're close to a really big lode."

Ab settled next to him, not sitting, but hunkering down on his haunches. "You think Anse is right in the head?"

"Why ask a fool question?"

"He don't seem right t'me. Seem like he suspecticates me an' you all the time, like we's stealing from him."

"We're not stealing, and he knows it."

"Then why does he give me the fish-eye all the time? Man worries when his partner gives him the gol-durned fish-eye."

"Maybe he does think you're stealing, then," Dipper heard himself say and . . . he felt odd, drifty. _That's not my voice!_ "Hey, Ab, why'd you spend so much on grub?"

"Didn't. Just four-odd dollars on grub. Rest of it, price of blastin' powder's gone way up since the last time we bought it."

"That's the War."

"Reckon so. You never told me, which side you favor, Union or Confederates?"

"I favor my own side," Dipper heard his odd adult voice say. _I'm dreaming. This isn't real. I'm dreaming this. Only—_

_Not like your normal dreams, Pine Tree!_

_Bill! Are you seeing this?_

_I spy with my little eye a ghost dream, kid. You're tapping into the ghost of a memory of a phantom event. I think you may be in trouble._

_Am I dreaming about the guys who—you know—or do you—_

_The Murderer's Creek Massacre, they called it back in them-thar days._

_Gah. Wake me up!_

_No can do, Pine Tree—I'm way too far from you geographically. I mean, this is the Mindscape, but I'm still more or less stuck around the sad remainder of my physical form here in the woods. I can barely keep up this long-distance chat. I couldn't even do that, except you have a tiny fragment of me in you and vice-versa! Let's see how this goes. And remember, kid, dreams can't hurt you._

_Bill?_

_But Bil_ l Cipher's voice, or his imagined version of it, had faded out. Now he was riding his horse into the covered bridge, leading a donkey loaded with shovel, pickaxes, and big, shallow gold pans behind on a tether. Beside him rode Ab, leading his own donkey, loaded with sacks of food. The animal's hoofs clattered and echoed in the bridge.

"There he be," growled Ab. "'Bout blame time!"

Framed in the arch of daylight at the far end of the bridge, "Devil" Anse M'Graw waited in the saddle of his jet-black horse Diablo. "You took your time!" he called. "You git the money, Ab?"

Ab called back, "Yeah, and bought the grub and the powder at Northwest's Trading post! Got fifty for the dust, got some change left to split up."

"How much?"

"Thirty-three. What's that make it each? Ten?"

"Eleven. There's three of us," Dipper heard himself say.

"Hear that, Anse? Mace done that in his head!"

"He used to be a schoolteacher," M'Graw said. As he and the other rider emerged into the open, Dipper saw that Anse was a wiry, rawboned, red-faced, hard-looking man, not old, but weathered, with a shock of black hair and a heavy growth of beard. He wore buckskins, and he impatiently turned his horse, cursing at the animal. "Mace, you do any good panning along the creek?"

"Ounce and a half of dust over the last four days," Dipper said. "No nuggets."

"'With what we done got, that makes about seventy, eighty dollars worth," Anse muttered, not sounding pleased. "Ain't enough! We need more of a stake for the big mine, before somebody comes along and runs us off."

"Sell some of the ore we've dug there already," Dipper suggested.

In a fierce growl, Anse replied, "No! Take in mined gold, then we'd have these here polecats all around us a-swarmin' in and the consarned whole place out yonder'd be dug up an' ruined! We gotta keep the gold vein a secret until we can pan enough dust and nuggets to make it worthwhile to cash in, cut, and run."

Ahead the track wound upward a hundred feet and there, leaning against the mountain as if it would fall if it didn't, stood the ramshackle shantytown of Plenty. Dipper knew without knowing how that he and the other three had first struck gold down in the creek a few years before—but then the gold-seekers got wind of the strike and descended on them, and the greenhorn newcomers had built the bridge and the mine works and had driven a shaft into the mountain and chipped away at a meager thread of gold ore.

However, three months earlier, without letting a soul in Plenty know what they were up to, he and Ab and Anse had at last discovered the place where the larger lode emerged from the side of the mountain, close by that waterfall. And they had staked the claim, and now they'd started on working it. _One good year, thousand or three thousand dollars for my share, and then I can go down to San Francisco with money enough live high on the hog, he thought. Buy into a business, maybe, find me a girl, get married_.

"What'd you say?" Anse asked, giving him a sharp sideways glance.

"Nothing. I didn't say anything."

"You said 'Wendy.'"

"Did I? I don't remember saying that."

"Well, it ain't windy. Wisht it was, hot as blazes as it's been. Not a breath of cool air stirrin'. Wisht it'd rain, too. This heat, drive a man crazy." Anse laughed in a strange way and dug his spurs into his horse's sides.

 _Oh, my gosh! He's gonna kill us tonight!_ Dipper thought. _Ab and me will be asleep, and Anse will slip up with that tomahawk, and he'll do for us_.

He found he was reaching for a six-shooter that rode on his right hip.

_Him or me. Gonna be him or me._

But he was frantically thinking to himself, _Wake up, wake up, wake up!_

* * *

 

**Chapter 5: Intruder in the Dark**

A hand clamped over his mouth, and Dipper, certain the tomahawk was going to strike, jerked and started to struggle.

_Dipper! It's me, man! Don't yell or anything—don't make a sound!_

_—Wendy! I was having a horrible dream—_

_Shh, shh! Don't wake Mabel! There's something roaming around the tent!_

It took him just a moment to register what she had said. He felt a sick surge in his stomach, the feeling he got when Gravity Falls weirdness unexpectedly broke out.

_—What? A bear or something?_

_Can't tell. I got my axe. You got anything you could fight with?_

_—No, not really. Hey, what about the knife?_

_No, can't do much with a four-inch blade. I'm gonna take my hand off your mouth._

Wendy broke contact and broke their communication with it. Then he felt her grab his wrist, and the telepathy came back: Here, man—this is a hatchet. Not much, but better than that dinky little filleting knife. Be quiet, but sit up and listen, see if you can hear it.

Dipper eased his legs out of the sleeping bag and got up on his knees. He reached out toward Wendy and bumped something soft. Then he found her arm.

_—Sorry, I can't see!_

_It's OK, dude, I know you weren't coppin' a feel. Under other circumstances I might even—hey, hear that?_

Dipper listened, but holding onto her bare arm like that he wasn't sure if he were hearing through his own ears or Wendy's. Whatever, sounds of the night came to him: the chirps of many hundreds of field crickets, the thumb-across-comb-teeth rattle of cicadas, and the shrill, nearly hysterical _hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo_ of a Western screech owl somewhere in the distance.

The insects reminded Dipper of a long trip his family had taken when he and Mabel were about eight, a seemingly endless drive that finally halted in Orlando, Florida, where his widowed grandmother had moved. He really didn't remember a lot about his Gramma's house or even about the amusement parks they had visited, but the strange sounds of a Southern night had lingered with him and sometimes disturbed his dreams. The Florida night bugs rioted much more loudly than their cousins in Oregon.

_There, dude! Hear that?_

_—Just the insects. And the owl._

_Twigs breaking. Listen harder, man!_

And then it came to him—a kind of snuffling breathing, not exactly close but not very far away, followed by a throaty grunt that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

_—Yeah, got it. Bear, you think?_

_Don't think so. Maybe a coyote or raccoon. Ringtail cat, even, though I've never seen one in the Valley._

_—Ringtail?_

_Weasel-like thing. Like this._

Wendy sent him a mental photograph of an animal he'd never even heard of, let alone seen: Brown, not masked like a raccoon, with a body like a squirrel's, maybe a foot or a little more long, and a fluffy dark-brown and white striped tail at least that long. Its head looked oddly canine, sort of like a Chihuahua's.

_That's what they call a ringtail cat, Dip._

_—Never seen anything like it._

_Related to raccoons, I think. Pretty rare. I've heard they make strange grunty noises, but I've never heard one. They're nocturnal, too. I don't know, though, man—this thing sounds bigger than that._

_—What are we going to do?_

_Sit tight unless it comes up and threatens us. If it does, and if it's big, you take Mabel and dig out for the car. You can find your way. Don't worry about me. Keep her safe._

_—No! Absolutely not! We're with you._

_Shh. It's stopped, I think. It may be smelling us._

They heard a low rumble, not quite a growl, and in her sleep Mabel mumbled, "Don't fart in my bedroom, Widdles!"

From outside the tent came a breathy "Hah!" sound.

_It's coming closer. Get behind me, Dipper! If it busts into the tent, turn on the lantern quick—wait until I tell you, though—and keep Mabel safe!_

_Dipper had to fumble around to find the electric lantern, and when he reached back to touch Wendy's arm, he touched her thigh instead—she had noiselessly risen to her feet._

_Save that for later, dude!_

_—Sorry!_

_I think it's right outside. It's waiting to see what we'll do. Dipper, get ready. Turn on the light now!_

Dipper flipped the switch. The light flooded the dome tent, and he saw Wendy, in her lemon-colored underwear, standing crouched with her back to him, clutching her axe. Beyond her, the green tent wall curved upward. Dipper stood, holding the lantern so it didn't cast her shadow in front of it, and touched her bare shoulder.

_—Still outside?_

_Yeah. Close, too. I can hear it breathing._

And then—something big pushed against the side of the tent, bulging it inward. Wendy tensed, raising the axe.

Dipper suddenly exclaimed, " _Spiritus sanctus, defendat contra terrors a tenebris_!"

Whatever was outside the tent roared—but the tent fabric sprang back into place as though the—thing, whatever—had simply vanished.

For a moment Dipper could actually hear his heartbeat, the blood in his veins throbbing louder than anything else—and then he realized that it was all silence. The insects and owl had stopped their calls when the intruder had approached the tent, as if they all waited to see what would happen.

The silence broke when a cricket chirped, and then another answered, and soon the cicadas had joined the chorus and the normal night sounds returned.

Wendy put an arm around him.

_What was that you yelled, Dipper?_

_—An old Latin prayer. Grunkle Ford copied it in one of the Journals and said it was good against night evils, and I memorized it, but I don't know if I pronounced everything right. It means "Holy spirit, defend us against the terrors of darkness."_

_Seems to work, man. It was like that thing just vaporized. Mabes still asleep?_

_—It takes more than a grunting monster to get her moving._

_Let's step outside. Bring the lantern._

They ducked out of the tent and stood atop the grassy hill. Dawn wasn't far off—the eastern sky showed some light. The sky held no moon—it was new that same night, and dark—but the stars had that sharp cold brightness of a place far away from cities. The morning air smelled of water and cooled Dipper's skin so much it gave him goosebumps. In the yellow light of the lantern, nothing unusual showed up anywhere on the hill as they circled the tent. Then, almost back to the tent entrance, Wendy knelt and said, "Hold the light here."

Dipper stood beside her, shading the lantern with his hand. He could see in the grass an irregular gray smudge, almost shapeless and maybe six inches broad and fifteen long. "What's that?"

"Whatever it was stepped in the ashes of the campfire. That's a footprint."

"It's huge!"

"Yeah. Funny, it must've been something flesh and blood to leave the print, but your magic spell or whatever seems to have scared it away, banished it like a ghost."

"Must have been a bear," Dipper said.

Wendy shook her head. "Right size, I guess, but I don't think it was. I've run into bears in the wild before. Well, so have you."

"The Multibear's a little different, though," Dipper said. "He talks. And likes BABBA."

"Yeah, no accounting for tastes," Wendy said, getting up again. "Hey, dude, we're practically naked."

"Oh, yeah," Dipper said.

She gave him a wicked grin. "Don't tell me you hadn't noticed! Nice to see you're interested in me, even after that scare."

"Don't tease me," Dipper muttered. He moved the lantern so it didn't illuminate him quite so much. "What should we do now?"

"Go back inside. Be daylight in maybe an hour and a half. I'll stay awake, just in case whatever it is comes back. You get into your jeans and shirt."

"Think we should cut the trip short?"

Wendy took a long time answering. "All right, man, first of all, you and Mabel ain't exactly pushovers, OK? I mean, you guys have stood up against worse than this. Second, whatever it was, ghost or bear or monster or whatever, it didn't hurt us, or even try to. More like it was curious than anything else. And third—"

"You're a flippin' Corduroy!" Dipper said.

She laughed. "Yeah, you got it. So, I say we stay and just keep a sharp watch from here on until we say it's time to go—we won't let something just scare us off like that. Anyhow, we're only planning to stay one more night. I don't know, maybe it was a bear or something. It may not even be anything to worry about. Tell you what, though: When we go to take a look at the old ghost town, we'll pack out the tent and set it up close to the car in that little clear spot. That way we'll have an escape route if anything scary should come around again."

"Sounds like a plan."

She held the tent flap and motioned him in. Dipper stooped and as he bent forward, she suddenly gave him a slap on the rump. "Ow! What was that for?"

"Couldn't resist, man," Wendy said. "Your butt in those tighty whiteys was just too tempting. Nice and firm, Dip! That's what getting in shape does for you. Nice buns, man!"

"Yeah, well—you, your, I mean—you're nice all over," he whispered as she came in and zipped the tent opening shut again. "Upstairs and downstairs, I mean."

"Thanks, I guess. Douse the light, Dip."

As he did, she touched his neck.

_Might be better if we didn't get back in the bags, man. Leave us free to jump up if whatever it was comes back. Can you get into your jeans in the dark?_

_—Yeah._

He found the ones he'd taken off and in the dark struggled into them, got them zipped, and heard Wendy pulling on her own jeans. Then she flailed around and grabbed his wrist again.

_OK, if you're not cold, let's just lay on top of the sleeping bags. If we need to jump up, we can. We can hold hands and talk this way and not wake up Mabel._

_—OK. But I AM a little cold._

_Got that covered, dude._

They lay down, and she reached for him and pulled him close, snuggling soft against him.

_That warm you up?_

_—Oh, yeah!_

_Whoa! Don't get ideas, man. This is just for comfort. Well—and it's nice, too, I'll admit._

Driven by impulse, Dipper kissed her, to find she had the same idea. Their lips met, they lingered, and finally they broke apart. Dipper gave a long sigh.

— _I'm glad we're with you, Lumberjack Girl._

_Glad I got my Big Dipper along._

Somehow, cuddled together with her like that, warm and happy, despite the scare he'd had, Dipper found that the next hour and a half went by all too fast.

Well, day would surely bring comfort. Evil things always came with the dark, not in bright sunshine.

Didn't they?

* * *

 

**Chapter 6: Things that Go Bump in the Daytime**

When the sun rose sometime after five and they got up and started to finish dressing, Wendy didn't insist that Dipper leave the tent, but just turned her back to him and put on her bra by pulling her white undershirt off her arms, but not completely over her head, and snapping the bra behind her, leaving him feeling a little bit dizzy.

In the green-filtered light of the tent, she caught him looking goofy and grinned. "No big deal, Dip! You couldn't see anything but maybe a glimpse of side boob from where you were, and it's not like I got all that much anyway. Listen, we have some things to talk over. Let's go outside."

Dipper and Wendy left the tent and, sitting on a folded waterproof cloth spread on the dewy grass, they agreed that they wouldn't tell Mabel about the night visitor right off the bat. "Let's get breakfast into her first," Wendy suggested. "She'll be in a better frame of mind then."

She got up and fetched the food bag from down the hillside, where it hung out of reach of the bears and beasts and they got busy, Dipper starting the fire and Wendy cooking. Breakfast was to be flapjacks—like Stancakes, but thicker, browner, bubblier, and with no hair—that Wendy had again mixed up in advance. It just required putting the right amount of water in the baggie (which contained flour, baking powder, powdered eggs, powdered milk, and some whey protein), kneading it until the batter was the right creamy consistency, and then frying the cakes up in a little oil. They had brought no syrup, but dried fruits stewed in boiling water made a good substitute, and instead of bacon, they''d eat turkey jerky. A battered old blue-enameled coffee pot would percolate just enough for a full cup each for the campers.

While the first batch of flapjacks was cooking on the campfire, and when the coffee smell began to drift on the cool morning air, Dipper woke Mabel up. She crawled out of the sleeping bag muttering and moaning, then chased Dipper out of the tent so she could get dressed. She showed up a few minutes later, decked out in jeans, hiking shoes, and a red T-shirt instead of her sweater, though she had appliquéd a copy of her trademark rainbow shooting star on it. The last week in July could get hot, and sweaters only added to the weight she had to carry. She sniffed the air and asked, "What's so yummy?"

"Breakfast!" Wendy said. "You want coffee?"

She made a face. "Not really, but I'll drink it. It does smell nice, and I need something to wake me up." Like Dipper, she took hers with a good dollop off milk, powdered this time.

Just before she took up the second set of pancakes—everybody would have four in all—Wendy suddenly said, "Hey, you guys feel that?"

"I heard something," Mabel told her, holding out her plate as if impatient. "Thunder, I thought."

"Might've been a little earthquake," Dipper said. "It felt sort of like the ones we get at home, the ones that they call the little tremblors, like a three on the old Richter scale. I kind of felt it through the soles of my feet."

"Huh. Nothing happening now," Wendy said, giving the flapjacks a final expert flip and then sliding them onto Mabel's plate to join the first two.

Mabel sat down cross-legged and started to make her breakfast disappear, while Dipper, having watched Wendy as she cooked, took over chef duties and made Wendy's pancakes for her. For some reason, after she finished eating, Mabel decided she'd rather roll down the dewy, grassy hill rather than cook for her brother, so Dipper made his own breakfast, too.

"You did a good job," Wendy told him, wiping up the last of the fruit juice in her plate with a bit of flapjack. "Nicely browned and not burned. Hey, dude, I like the way you guys didn't fuss over Mabel goofing off and letting you shift for yourself."

Dipper shrugged. "When Mabel and I have an argument, we think it should be about something worthwhile, you know? Like whether she can give me a forced makeover or not." He poured himself a cup of coffee, draining the little coffee pot, and sat next to Wendy to eat.

With a chuckle, Wendy said, "Yeah, I'd call that a crucial issue."

As soon as he finished, they started to clean everything up. They scattered the coffee grounds in the grass and had no waste to bury this time, except for the baggies that had held the pancake mix, the dried fruit, and the jerky, and Wendy packed two of them in the last one and stuck them all in her pocket to dispose of later.

"Where are you guys?" Mabel yelled from down the hill just as Dipper scoured out the frying pan in the water of the lower spring basin. Wendy took it from him and dried it.

"Right in front of you!" Dipper shouted back, waving, as he picked up the aluminum plates, now washed and dry, to pack.

Mabel sounded a little frightened: "What? What are you guys pulling? C'mon!"

"Just come up the hill!" Dipper said. "We're right here! Open your eyes."

Mabel lowered her head and pumped her legs as she ran in what looked like mild panic toward them. She paused and glanced up, her face pale—but relief flooded into her expression. "Oh, there you are! I guess I lost you over the top of the hill."

Dipper gave her a funny look, but she came up, flopped down in front of the tent, and finished her cup of coffee without adding anything to what she'd said. She smacked her lips. "It's still hot, anyhow. I'm kinda damp now."

"That's what you get for rolling round in grass covered with dew. The sun will fix that soon enough. Wash and dry your cup when you finish," Dipper said. "You need to clean something up."

"You sound like Mom, telling me to clean up! Like you ever do any cleaning yourself, except when Wendy's around," Mabel said with a smirk. "OK, Broseph, I got it."

From a dozen steps away, Wendy frowned, looking down the hill, toward the beaver-pond swamp. "That's funny."

"What is?" Dipper asked.

"Funny ha-ha?" asked Mabel hopefully as she rinsed her cup.

"Funny strange," Wendy muttered. "Dudes, am I going crazy? Looks to me like the swampy pond down there's a whole lot smaller than it was yesterday. Smaller than I ever remember it being."

Dipper shaded his eyes and looked down. "Yeah, you're right," he said, his voice coming out a croak.

The beaver pond now hugged the steep base of the cliffs in a smooth curve, less than half the width it had been, the water clearer and cleaner-looking—and now the border of it appeared firm and dry, not an algae-scummed mess of mud. In fact, it was about as grassy as the hilltop they camped on. "Something's going on."

"Get me the binoculars, Dip," Wendy said, gazing into the distance.

Dipper fetched them and handed them to her. "What?"

She pointed off in the distance. "Can you even see the covered bridge?"

Dipper looked. "Uh—no. Trees are in the way. But didn't we see it from right about here last evening?"

"Clear as anything," Wendy replied. She scanned the distance with the binoculars. "Nothing. I mean, it must be there, but the trees in between somehow got a lot taller overnight. Or—" she frowned. "Maybe we're not in the same place we were. Maybe something moved us, hill and all."

"Waterfall is in the same place, though," Mabel said. "I can see the little rainbow and the shimmery ghosty guy inside it."

"Wendy, look down at the base of the waterfall," Dipper said, nearly whispering. "Over to the left of it, against the cliff. Something's moving. Looks like a man and an animal."

Wendy refocused the binoculars. She, too, spoke softly, as though not wanting to attract attention: "Dude leading a mule—no, a donkey. Hey, he went right behind the left side of the waterfall!"

"I couldn't see much detail. What—what did he look like?" Dipper asked.

"Uh, had a short brown beard, looked like a red flannel shirt, jeans, boots, a raggedy-looking gray hat like, you know, a cowboy hat."

"Maybe," Dipper said slowly, "it's somebody looking for gold. The way he's dressed and the donkey—that all sounds like a prospector."

"But there's not a ledge there for him and his donkey to walk on," Wendy said. "Or if there is, the water should be covering it. I've never seen that level strip of rock exposed."

"Exposed? Who, Dipper? Did you forget to zip up, you scallywag?" Mabel asked brightly, and loudly, right behind them, making them both jump.

"We're trying to figure out something weird," Dipper said.

"Mabel," Wendy broke in, "first, we should tell you about something kinda scary that happened last night."

Still speaking in hushed tones, they explained how something had come close to the tent in the dark, with Dipper adding some details about his dream. "Huh!" Mabel said. "Funny. I kinda dreamed that that shape in the waterfall came to life and was out stomping around looking for somebody or something."

Dipper glanced at Wendy, who shrugged and said, "I didn't dream anything that I can remember. Look I think if we go down on this side of the spring, we can jump across the creek there and see if we can find the track that guy took when he went behind the waterfall. He might be able to tell us what's going on."

"I . . . don't know if we should," Dipper said. "Did you notice if he was wearing a holster and pistol?"

Wendy thought. "No, don't think he was, but he had mining tools strapped onto his donkey—picks and shovels. And a rifle, I think. Maybe a shotgun."

"I don't think we ought to sneak up on anybody like that," Dipper said. "Especially somebody armed. Prospectors can get possessive about keeping their mines secret. And sometimes they go a little crazy."

"Like Old Man McGucket when we first met him," Mabel said helpfully. "Remember? 'It's a jig of grave dannnger!' And 'It scabdoodled over t' Scuttlebutt Island.' He was adorable."

"Not the word I'd choose," Dipper said.

Wendy shrugged. "Maybe Dipper's right about not approaching that prospector dude cold. Let's go off that way instead, to the right, and scout around some. I want to see what's caused the change in the beaver pond."

They started down the hill, but suddenly Mabel shrieked, "OMG! I think your car's on fire, Wendy!"

"What!" Wendy stopped in her tracks and stared. "Huh. Smoke. Not from where the Dart's parked, though. That's coming from off around the foot of the mountain, 'bout where the ghost town is. But I don't think it's a building on fire—looks more like kitchen fires in wood stoves."

Mabel gave her a skeptical stare. "Wood stoves? What keeps them from burning?"

Absently, Wendy explained, "They burn wood, Mabel. They're made of cast iron."

Dipper could see the thin, wispy trails of gray smoke, more than a half-dozen, floating up in the air and then being caught in a breeze and smudged from existence. "Maybe we should go back to the car, anyway," he said uneasily. "I mean, why would anyone have cooking fires in a ghost town? There shouldn't be anybody over there, right?"

Wendy shook her head. "Shouldn't be."

Mabel yelled again: "They stole our tent!"

That made Dipper whip around and look uphill—and sure enough, he saw no sign of the green dome tent. "That's impossible!"

They all ran uphill—and shimmering into view, as though materializing out of air, the tent returned. "Uh—ever run into anything like this, Dip?" Wendy asked. "Or read anything in the Journals about it?"

Dipper shook his head. "No. You guys stand there at the tent. I'm gonna back off slowly and check something."

Dipper edged down the hill, slow step after step—and then both tent and girls went glimmery and transparent, and with another half-step they had faded out. "Can you see me?" he called.

"Yeah, Brobro!" Mabel yelled back. "Wait, what? Have we, like, disappeared? Turned invisible? That would be so cool! We could check out what guys talk about in boys' rooms!"

Dipper took two steps back up. "And you're back again. I can see you now. That must've been what happened a while ago when Mabel lost sight of us."

He came the rest of the way up the hill, scratching the back of his neck. "It's like there's, I don't know, a force field or something right around the crest of the hill here. When you go outside it, everything inside vanishes. But not vice-versa, because you could still see me, and we can see the beaver pond and waterfall and all."

"It's like paranormal camouflage," Mabel said. "What's doing it? A wizard?"

"Doubt it, sis. I'm just not sure, never run into this phenomenon before. But maybe—just to be safe—we ought to pack up the tent and carry everything off the hill. It's just possible we could lose the stuff for good."

Mabel gasped. "You think everything might just disappear for good? The sweater I started is in the tent!"

"Then let's pack it up, too," Wendy said. "I'll divide up what's left of our food."

Dipper and Wendy broke down the tent, folded, and rolled it, and Wendy helped Dipper strap it across the top of his backpack. The hardest parts to store were the tent ribs, which folded and were flexible, but even folded down, they were still over two feet long and projected out on each side. That made moving through the woods difficult sometimes.

They made sure they'd completely put out their fire with water and covered the ashes with dirt. "Don't think we need to scatter the rocks this time," Wendy said. "Far as I can tell, nobody ever uses this campsite except my family and you guys. Ready to hike?"

Whether they were or not, they started out. Halfway down the hill, Wendy stopped again. "This is crazy," she said.

"What is it now?" Dipper asked.

Pointing, she said, "Dude, I know the tree where I hung our food bag is supposed to be right there. But there's just a bunch of saplings. Man, you can't just move a tree! And it was here at, like, five-thirty this morning, 'cause I went and hauled down the bag to get our breakfast started."

That was odd; odder still was the fact that they walked down a gradually flattening grassy slope to the edge of the beaver pond, where they spotted a couple of the critters cruising low in the water. They encountered no expanse of mud. Wendy shook her head. "Man, their dam's a whole lot smaller than it was yesterday. No wonder the ledge that leads under the falls wasn't visible—water's at least three feet lower now than it was."

"Not so brown and green, either," Mabel said. "Look, you can see the glittery mud on the bottom. And there are some fish swimming down there, too."

"Yellow perch," Wendy murmured. "Small, but if you get enough, they make a good meal. Man, I can't wrap my head around all these changes!"

They stood almost opposite the waterfall, now only thirty feet away, and they were low enough so that the rainbow—shrunken in the early morning sunlight when glimpsed from up on their hill—stretched up taller from their perspective than they had yet seen it. The illusion of a fifteen-foot-tall giant inside the waterfall looked clearer, too, like a giant beginning to stir his limbs and tilt his head—though it was all a trick of flowing whitewater, reflection, and light and the shape of the rocks on the cliff face. "Where does the river come from before it breaks over into the falls?" Dipper asked.

"From the far bluffs, Dip. This part of the mountain's a tapering plateau sort of thing, like a long, slanting shelf of rock getting wider as it gets toward the bluffs. Just past the peak off to the right there is where the town of Plenty was built at the foot of what they called Mount Silence. If we could climb up to where the river pours through that break in the cliff, we'd see that we were in kind of a narrow rocky valley that goes on northwest for, like, six or eight miles. Dad said that the river stars as a spring jetting out of a cleft in the bluffs, but I've never climbed up there to see it. Nobody I know has."

"Like the Lost World in that Arthur Conan Doyle book," Dipper said. "Anything might live up on that plateau."

"Guys," Mabel said quietly but with urgency.

Wendy replied to Dipper: "Nothing stranger than the ordinary stuff we see around Gravity Falls, I'll bet."

"Uh—guys?"

Dipper didn't want to concede the point: "But there might be, I don't know, centaurs and fauns and—"

"Run!" screamed Mabel, and only then did Dipper see the threatening dark shapes snaking toward them, running like predators on silent feet—running right on the surface of the water.

* * *

 

**Chapter 7: Monsters of the Mind**

The creatures' bodies were swirls of India ink poured into clear water, strings and clots and twirling ribbons of midnight in the morning sun, sketching humanoid forms that endlessly shifted and spun—

The three—ghosts, wraiths, whatever they were, ran from the base of the waterfall toward Dipper, Mabel, and Wendy. "Behind me, dudes!" yelled Wendy, brandishing her axe. "Dipper, get Mabel to safety!"

Dipper pushed his sister behind him, but he reached for two folded sections of the tent ribs, gripping one in each hand, like the eskrima sticks used in Filipino kali fighting.

The monstrous inky things, whatever they were, split, two going to the left, one to the right, as if to encircle the kids. Wendy had backed them away from the water's edge. When the closest one charged her, she swung her axe, decapitating it—

But the head tumbled like cotton candy on a breeze, and the body merely streaked to re-join it. "There's nothin' to them!" Wendy shouted. "Like fighting smoke!"

"Grappling hook!" Mabel snapped, firing hers through the belly of one of the other two, charging with wide-spread arms. Like Wendy, she split it—this time cleanly in two—and the torso went spinning crazily until the hips and legs ran after it, caught up to it, and they re-joined.

The third creature approached Dipper, ominous and silent, head lowered. Though it had no eyes, it somehow stared at him, and he knew it wanted him dead. It stalked toward him, slowly, stretching out a clutching long-fingered hand—

Wendy's axe swooshed through, severing it at the elbow!

"Back to back!" Wendy said. "Hold 'em off! Dipper, you got anything?"

"No spells or anything!" He took a deep breath. "Help us now!" he yelled.

It wasn't exactly a chant or a spell or a prayer, but he said it from the heart, thinking of Mabel and how good she could be, how she had memorialized her favorite teacher, and stood beside Dipper and always had his back. And Wendy, resenting all the work her family forced her to do—but doing it doggedly, seeing it through. _I'm the weak one_ , he thought. _But if ever I tried to help others, help us now!_

The inky shapes slowly circled them, almost as though goating, anticipating the kill.

The treetops began to thrash.

Dipper heard a roaring sound like the waterfall, but coming from high up, from the sky. The shapes froze and then turned and fled back onto the surface of the beaver pond, their feet making no mark on the face of the water as they rushed toward the waterfall—

"Yah!" Wendy had yelled, then turned and dived, her arms pushing both Dipper and Mabel to the ground, as a great wind slammed into the earth, whipping the calm surface of the beaver pond to churning white water.

Dipper caught his breath and grabbed Wendy's trapper hat—the wind had swept it off her head, and he barely caught it. Her hair streamed out like the tail of a comet—

The wind hit the trio of fleeing ink-shapes, ripped them apart, blasted the smoky shreds of them against the face of the cliff opposite—

And then everything went quiet—except for splatters of wind-raised water falling back into the pond. Wendy gasped, "You OK?"

"Everything hurts," Mabel groaned, but she sat up and retracted the line of her grappling hook.

Dipper pushed himself upright, gasping. "I'm OK," he said. "Here's your hat."

She clapped it onto her disheveled head. "Thanks, dude. Lucky yours stayed on."

"My head kinda pinned it to the ground," Dipper said. Wendy stood up and held out her hands to help the twins to their feet.

Mabel rubbed the back of her head and then waved, grinned, and yelled, "Hi there! How are you?"

Dipper looked at her. She was waving both hands cheerfully. He looked around—and thirty yards away, across the pond and standing beside the waterfall he saw the guy Wendy had described, bearded, wearing a ratty gray Stetson-type hat—and carrying a rifle or shotgun.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

They retreated up the slope and into the forest. "Man," Wendy said, "my hair's, like, a mess!" She tugged at the snarls and tangles.

"Not important right now," Dipper said, ducking to peek around a tree. "Getting away from here is."

"Is he following us?" Mabel asked.

"No. Just standing there."

"Come on," Wendy told them.

They struggled through dense woods that stood in heavy, soft leaf mould and shared the space with impenetrable stands of ferns, thick clusters of mushrooms and toadstools, vines, and other plants that Dipper didn't recognize. Wendy, though, muttered, "Boxwood. Salmonberry. Hawkweed. Man, this is real old-growth underbrush! And the trees—like they've never been harvested. I don't like this."

"Let's get back to the car," Mabel said. "Those ghosty things—I think they were after us."

"What did we _do_ , though?" Dipper asked. "I mean, ghosts have a purpose! Like remember the Duskertons? All they wanted was to keep teenagers out of their store!"

"Yeah, and last year for us to clean up the mess we made," Wendy reminded him.

"No," Mabel corrected her. "Cleaning up was _Dipper's_ idea. He offered. _We_ were just gonna warn them that people were planning to bulldoze their store."

"But they didn't bulldoze it," Dipper said. "See, that's my point—the ghosts wanted to protect their store, and they did. They had a purpose. So why were those, I don't know, wraiths, whatever, after us? We haven't done anything!"

They reached a small clearing and stopped to rest. Mabel said, "Wendy, let me put your hair in a braid. Otherwise it's gonna keep snagging and picking up twigs and junk."

"We don't have time," Dipper said.

"Yeah, we do! I work fast."

Sure enough, in just a few minutes Mabel had plaited Wendy's long red hair into four braids, two of them making a kind of coronet around her head, then falling to join the others down her back.

Dipper couldn't' stop staring. "You look _good_ ," he said.

"Only thing," Wendy said, "I can't hide my axe sheath under it now."

"I don't think that matters," Dipper said. "In fact, if I were you, I'd just hold my axe out in plain sight."

"Good point. And Dip—here's the hatchet. Tell you what, we've worked downstream a good ways now. Let's get out of the woods and follow the bank of the beaver pond. The beaver dam shouldn't be far, and then it'll be just a mile to the car. The goin' will be easier out in the open."

They had to hack their way through a couple of fern jungles, but they finally came to the edge of the woods. The voice of the waterfall had become a distant, constant thunder. The beaver pond had broadened out, but its bank still remained grassy. "The beavers keep the trees trimmed," Mabel said. "Look, they made little hills of sticks in the water."

"Beaver lodges," Wendy said. "They live in those."

"Huh. Convenient to where they work. Good idea!"

Dipper kept looking back anxiously, but he could see only the upper part of the waterfall—rocks and cliffs now intervened—and he could glimpse no trace of the prospector, if that's what the man with the weapon was.

"There's the bridge in the distance," Wendy said grimly. "But look at it."

It looked—well, not new, but not ruinous, either. The roof held onto its sheathing of cedar shingles, and none seemed to be missing. The main structure wore a flaking coat of whitewash, and no tree protruded from the entrance. They'd have to go up a long, gradual slope to get to the place where Wendy had parked the Dart. Now Dipper could smell smoke as well as see the drifting columns—the sour tinge of burning oak.

Stands of tall grass and weeds, chest-high, still choked their way, forcing them to wind in and out, taking a tortuous path. They passed through a crowded thicket of alder saplings, squeezing their way through. Wendy stopped at one point and looked down. "Huh. Scat."

"What are you shooing off?" Mabel asked.

"No," Wendy said absently. "Scat. Animal droppings. Poop. In this case, bobcat."

"Bobcat?" Dipper asked nervously.

"Ooh, kitties!" Mabel said.

"Definitely not cuddly," Wendy told her. "Bobcats are wild animals, Mabes. Lynxes. Pretty rare, but I've seen a couple now and then. They grow up to about thirty pounds or so, and they're dangerous. One can take down a deer. You see one, avoid it."

"Shh! There's a deer," Mabel whispered.

Dipper held his breath. They had pushed through the thicket and now only a scatter of tall ferns lay between them and the crest of their climb. Just beyond the ferns, on the hillside and maybe fifty feet away, a doe grazed. Her head came up, long ears alert and turned in their direction. "Whitetail," Wendy whispered. "Young one. Lucky we're downwind of her or we'd spook—oh, my God!"

Dipper grabbed her arm, not believing what he'd just seen.

The deer's head had arched back—and then it thudded to earth, severed and the neck spurting blood, and he heard a horrendous crunch. Something had—had bitten the deer's body off from the neck back, had eaten the deer almost whole—something—

"It's _invisible_ ," Mabel whispered, sounding shaken.

They could hear something snuffling and grunting. They could see the grass stirring as unseen feet crushed it. The invisible creature seemed to shamble aimlessly. Now and again they heard the sickening crunch of bone being crushed between great heavy teeth. "This way," Wendy said. "Real slow. Dipper, hold my hand."

They edged as silently as they could back behind the ferns.

_—Wendy, what's going on?_

_Don't know, dude. Some kind of evil creature. This is more your thing._

_—It's crazy, it's not some ordinary monster—this and the wraiths are more like magical creatures, like the ones Ford and I fought when Probabilator came to life._

_Come on—I don't hear whatever it is now. Car's right up here._

Except it wasn't. They couldn't even find the clear patch where they'd parked—saplings grew right up against the—well, the road was missing, too. Now it was only a rough-cut wagon track, weedy, deep-rutted, and muddy.

"We've gone back in time," Mabel said.

"I think you're right," Dipper agreed. "Wendy, remember we told you about Blendin Blandin and how we first met him? We got flipped back to, like, 1860. Wound up in a covered wagon."

"I taught Fertilia how to high-five," Mabel added helpfully.

"This—this sort of feels like that."

"Huh," Wendy said. "Well—this isn't the _weirdes_ t place I've been with you two. There was that funky cartoon-show dimension. I mean the ones where Gravity Falls was just a TV cartoon and we were so chunky and solid."

"And we all had five fingers," Mabel said. "I wonder what happened to that guy from Georgia we met? He was nice. He made a good Soos."

"We have five fingers _now,_ " Dipper pointed out. "What are we gonna do? How do we get back?"

"You said there must be some purpose," Wendy reminded him. "We find what it is and, I don't know, fulfill it."

"Yeah," Mabel said, still hung up on the earlier subject, "but we just grew our fifth fingers recently! In that comic-con dimension, we always had them. Or the bodies we were in always had them. You know, winning the costume contest second place was fun, but we deserved first place!"

"Mabel," Dipper said, "aren't you worried? We got chased by those—black inky things! We just saw something huge and invisible bite a deer in two! We may be lost in time! And you're complaining about not winning a costume prize?"

"Arts and crafts," she reminded him primly, "are my life."

"What do we do, what do we do?" Dipper asked.

Wendy hitched up her jeans. "I say we go into the town of Plenty," she said. "If we really are in old-timey days, that must be where the smoke's comin' from. We'll be among people there, and safer, while we figure out what to do. And now we can cross the bridge, 'cause it's not falling-down rotten."

"But—it's the Bridge of Death," Dipper pointed out.

"It's just a name, Dipper."

"Wait a minute," Mabel said. "When we used Blendin's time-travel tape and wound up on the Oregon Trail, we kinda stood out. I think Dipper and I ought to change clothes."

And so—they did. Dipper took off his pine-tree hat and pulled on a long-sleeved shirt he'd brought in case the nights were cold. Like Dipper, Mabel was wearing jeans, but now she took off the colorful T-shirt and exchanged it for a plain white one of Dipper's. She also had Wendy braid her hair—two braids, falling over her shoulders and tied with ribbon bows, like the ones she'd seen in drawings of Native American princesses. Wendy hung her and Mabel's backpacks and the tent roll high in the canopy of an oak, the tallest one around, but Dipper kept his backpack—"Remember, Broseph, it's a haversack now," Mabel cautioned him—with a few necessities in it.

Then, cautiously, they emerged on the trail, Dipper gripping the hatchet, Wendy with her axe, Mabel with her grappling hook. They went a few hundred yards down the winding track—and ahead of them gaped the dark entrance of the Bridge of Death.

But between them and the bridge lay the severed head of the hapless deer, the eyes glazing.

And somewhere—somewhere nearby—

Something invisible and evil and deadly lurked.

* * *

 

**Chapter 8: The Other Side**

The teens hesitated for a long time. The bridge was close and in plain sight—but they couldn't tell if the invisible something lurked between it and them. "Keep real quiet," Wendy warned them both in a whisper. "Listen. Anybody hears anything, or anybody sees the grass stirring, we back off quick."

Walking on the edge of the track through knee-high grass, they took a few cautious steps forward, and then Dipper, concentrating on the track and the bridge, stepped on something hard. He raised his foot and swallowed. What lay nearly buried in the mud under his hiking boots wasn't a rock, but a rusted, corroded pistol with a long barrel. He tugged on Wendy's sleeve and pointed at it.

She cautiously dipped down, just bending her knees, and pulled it out of the mud, dislodging clumps of the tall grass that had wrapped stringy roots around the weapon. The handle grips were gone—maybe decayed—and dirt choked the barrel. "Been here a real long time," she whispered before putting it back.

Two steps more, and Dipper spotted something else. He imitated Wendy and bent his knees to reach for it, bringing up a water-soaked buckskin leather bag about three inches long and oddly heavy. It held something gritty, and he stuck it in his jeans pocket. And then Mabel glimpsed a boot lying on the slope, concealed by the grass, and she picked it up.

It still . . . had the bony remains of a foot in it. She dropped it quickly.

Now they had edged to within fifty feet of the bridge—and at that moment, Wendy grabbed Dipper's hand. _I hear it behind us! Get Mabel across the bridge!_

Dipper didn't even yell, but as soon as Wendy let go of his hand, he grabbed Mabel's and ran for it. An angry gurgling roar burst from behind, a rumble like no animal he'd ever heard, and then their hiking boots pounded on the bridge floor and Wendy backed in after them, her axe raised and ready.

The invisible creature seemed to stop at the entrance. They heard huffs of breath, a bellow, and a blast of hot, stinking air rolled over them.

"Bad breath! Hey, it can't get inside!" Mabel said, hiccupping. "Like a cat outside a mouse hole!"

"Must be it's too big," Wendy said between clenched teeth. "Let's get all the way across."

They hurried to the far side—and just as they stepped out onto the track again, something struck the bridge on the side where the creature waited, making the whole structure shake and dust sift down in brown curtains from the rafters. Still nothing came after them. Wendy had been holding her breath, but she exhaled. "I think we're safe. From that thing, anyhow."

Dipper looked around. The steep mountain slope began only a few feet away. The track curved sharply off to the right, around a rocky spur, and now he saw a distant chimney around the bend, mostly hidden by a slope of loose rock—scree, it was called, the spill from the slopes of the mountain. "Let's go," he said. He didn't feel calmer until they had put the rock spur between themselves and the bridge.

* * *

 

"Wait here a minute," he said. They had arrived at a kind of niche, a cut in the stone roots of the mountain, out of sight of both the bridge and the little town. He pulled the leather pouch from his pocket and opened it, holding a cupped palm beneath. "Huh!"

Shining flakes poured out of it.

"Gold," Wendy said. "Whoever owned that gun—"

"And that boot," Mabel added in a small, sick voice.

Wendy finished: "—must've been a prospector. The thing ate him, I guess, and spit out the metal."

"Cold iron," Dipper muttered.

"What?"

"Evil spirits and creatures are supposed to be repelled by cold iron," Dipper said. "Ancient belief. I mean, you know, evil elves can't stand to be touched by anything iron, and the Gravity Falls fairies are terrified of it, and in some legends even witches and wizards can't defend against it. In the oldest vampire legends, a crucifix made of iron—not silver—is the best protection. A werewolf can be wounded by cold iron, too—the silver-bullet thing sort of came in with the movies."

"Cold iron?" Mabel asked, hiccupping again. "So . . . you don't plug it in?"

"Not a _steam_ iron," Dipper said. "The metal. Cold iron is iron that's been forged into shape and then cooled, that's all. Unless—hey, maybe it's meteorite iron!"

"You lost me, dude," Wendy said.

"OK, most iron is mined, right? Comes out of the ground as ore, like gold and silver, and then it's melted down and forged or cast and all that. But lots of meteorites are made mostly of iron, too—unearthly iron, iron from the depths of space. There's a legend that the first Bowie knife—you know who Jim Bowie was?"

"Um, no," Wendy said.

Mabel was adjusting the ribbon on one of her long braids. She suddenly vented an echoing belch, her personal hiccup cure. "That's better. I never heard of that guy, either."

Dipper sighed. "OK, Jim Bowie was sort of a Western hero. He died defending the Alamo in Texas—"

Mabel gave him a suspicious glance. "Who was he fighting? Why would they even attack a car-rental place?"

"GAH!" Dipper took three deep breaths. "The Alamo was a fortress. The Texans had declared their independence from Mexico. The Mexicans sent an army to fight them. The Mexican army besieged the Alamo, and the Texans inside the fortress all died fighting a much larger force—it was a massacre. OK, Jim Bowie and Sam Houston and Davy Crockett were leaders of the Americans who died at the battle of the Alamo, understand? Now, Jim Bowie had designed a special fighting knife—the Bowie knife, a dagger—and the legend says it was forged from iron he got from a meteorite."

"No rental cars?" Mabel asked. "'Cause if they had some, they could've driven away from the Mexican army—"

"This was in 1836!" Dipper said. "Before cars!"

"Chill, guys," Wendy said. "I get it, Dip. The invisible monster thing can't stand, like, steel and iron and gold, so it spits them out. Anyway, we got some money now."

"It's not ours," Dipper objected.

Wendy shrugged. "Yeah, but I don't think the guy who lost it has any use for it wherever he's gone."

"Finders keepers! Losers eaten!" Mabel pronounced.

"Well—OK," Dipper said. "But—let's be careful with it."

"Yeah," Wendy said with her crooked smile. "We won't spend it all in one place."

They had to go about half a mile farther before they came to a cleared hollow no bigger than a football field wedged in between the mountain base and deep forest. Eight log cabins huddled there, along with three or four small stores, two larger buildings, a barn, and, right up against the mountain, an oversized open-sided roofed structure that protected what looked like a tunnel. "Entrance to a mine," Dipper said.

A couple of men in flannel shirts and jeans and boots stood under the roof, deep in conversation, paying no attention to the three. They passed a well with a windlass and big wooden bucket before they came to the first buildings. Some donkeys and horses brayed and whinnied from the big barn at the far end of the town—now Dipper could that someone had hammered up a crude sign above the wide open doorway: LIVRY STABBLE.

The first square log house they came to—hardly more than a hut—also had a sign up over its door, newer, in better shape, and better spelled: _P. Foster ASSAYER SURVEYOR CLAIMS FILED_. Dipper stepped to the side of the building, took out the bag of gold flakes, and asked, "Mabel, do you have a handkerchief?"

"Nope. What do you need?"

"Something I can make a little bag from."

"Here ya go." She handed him a rectangle of white paper—the inner wrapper of a chocolate bar.

"I thought the food was for emergencies," Dipper said.

"A chocolate attack _is_ an emergency, Brobro!"

Dipper sighed, folded the paper, and shook about a quarter of the gold flakes into it. "Let's try our luck."

They went inside the assayer's office, a bell tinkling as they opened the door. The place didn't need a bell to announce visitors. There was one room, only ten feet square, where a heavily-mustached middle-aged man sat next to a tiny cast-iron stove at a small, square table mopping up he grease on a plate with part of a biscuit and drinking coffee from a tin cup. "Howdy, strangers," he said. "New in Plenty, are you?"

"That must be a rhetorical question," Mabel said. "'Cause you know everybody in this little place, right?"

The man chuckled. "An educated gal! Let me say the elevation of your discourse is incommensurate with the rude surroundings in which you find yourself, young lady."

"Thank you," Mabel said. "Also, whaaa?"

"Sir," Dipper said, "are you the assayer?"

"That's me, young fellow. Philetus Foster, at your service. What can I do for you?"

"We, uh, panned a little gold," Dipper said. "At least we think it's gold. Would you test it for us?"

"Sure thing. Let me put away the dishes." He did that by stacking them on the floor beside his chair. From a shelf behind him he took a small scale, which he set on the table, and a pair of oval spectacles. He spent some time hooking these over his ears and settling them on his nose before carefully looking at the scale, adjusting its balance, and bringing out a set of graduated weights. "Let me see your sample."

Dipper handed over the small package. "Is it real gold?" he asked.

Foster squinted. "Yep, pretty good quality, too. Let's see what it weighs out to."

He carefully put the sample in one brass pan of the scale and used tweezers to set three tiny weights in the other pan. "Comes to half an ounce and a hair more," he said. "How long did it take you to collect this?"

"Few days," Wendy said.

"Mm-hm. Well, the find won't make you rich, Miss—uh?"

"Mrs" Wendy said firmly. "Mrs. Ursus Mason. This here's my husband, and that's his sister."

Dipper started to shiver.

"Kinda young, ain't ya?" Foster asked, raising his eyebrows. Still, his voice sounded friendly.

"We're old enough, Mr. Mason and me," Wendy said. "Came along the Oregon Trail all on our own."

"Yeah," Mabel added. "And the rest of our families were all eaten by rattlesnakes!"

"Eaten?" Foster asked.

"They grow big rattlesnakes in Texas, pardner!" Mabel said. "You know, those were the Mexicans' secret weapon at the Alamo!"

Dipper coughed. "Our folks died of, uh, dysentery. My sister had a bad case of it, too. It makes her imagine things sometimes."

Foster nodded sympathetically. "Oh, well. You want to sell me this, young fellow? Can't give you as much as you'd get in a big town, but I could buy this much for, oh, say, eleven dollars, keep one for my fee, you'd clear ten."

"Sold!" Mabel said.

Dipper cut in quickly: "That's fine. Uh, is there any place to stay in town here?"

"Ma Beaker's," Foster said, taking a box from the shelf and counting out a mixture of silver and copper coins. "Let's see, five, six, seven, that's eight, and nine . . . twenty-five, fifty, seventy, ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine and a half, and ten."

"We sure got a mess of money!" Mabel exclaimed, looking at the little pile. Dipper swept it up and put it into his pocket.

"You lookin' to hire on at the mine?" Foster asked. "'Cause I'll tell you straight out, young fellow, you're out of luck there. Mine barely pays the six men who work it."

"I'll find something," Dipper said. "Uh—back at the bridge—a bear or something attacked us?"

Foster sat up straight. "What? It's back?"

"It bit a deer's head off," Mabel muttered.

Foster took of his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. "Oh, Lordy. We thought it had left for good. It's been gone for best part of a year—I'll tell some folks. Listen, young people, don't you try to cross that bridge until it goes away again! They call that the Death Bridge—for a spell right after the bridge was built, nobody trying to come or go was safe, don't know how many people got killed there over about three-four months until it went away. You run along to Ma Beaker's boarding house—next over from the stable. Tell her I sent you."

They thanked him. He left with them, locking the door—with a padlock—before he started off to one of the houses. A hound dog came from beside one of the other cabins and walked beside them as far as the big place with a sign that read BEAKER'S BOARDING HOUSE NO DRUMMERS.

"She's anti-musician!" Mabel said.

"In the old days, drummers were salesmen," Dipper said.

"She's anti-free enterprise!" said Wendy. When Dipper shot her a look, she said, "What, Mabel can do it but I can't?"

"Hope we can afford a meal," Mabel mumbled. "We don't have enough for rooms."

But Ma Beaker—a plump woman with frizzy brown hair and beady little eyes—looked them over and said, "Mr. Foster sent you, you say? Well, I can give you one room, two beds, two dollars for a week or a month for five."

"We'll take a week," Wendy said quickly.

"You want breakfasts and dinners? That's a dollar-fifty a week extra."

"We'll take the breakfasts and dinners," Dipper told her.

"Hold on just a minute," Ma Beaker said, staring hard at Wendy's left hand. "Where's your wedding ring, Missy?"

Wendy somehow made her eyes fill with tears. "Ma'am, when Mr. Mason's parents died of the dysentery, they left us so poor that we had to sell my rings and everything else we owned, pretty much, just to keep the wagon and get as far as Oregon."

Dipper reached out to take her hand. "But I'm a-gonna buy her a new one, soon as we get settled and I get me a job," he said. "By cracky."

She kissed his cheek.

"Huh. I reckon," Ma Beaker said, "that a gal tall as you woudn't kiss no man puny as him without you was hitched to him and had to. What do I call you?"

"Mr. and Mrs. Mason," Dipper said quickly. "And—"

"Miss Awesome Pines," Mabel put in.

"It's a nickname," Dipper said.

Mrs. Beaker seemed to take it in stride. "All right, Mr. Mason, that'll be three dollars fifty cents, and then I'll show you where the room is."

Dipper counted out three silver dollars and two quarters—none of them looking at all familiar, because the dollar coins showed a woman sitting on a chair with stars around her and the quarters were almost miniature versions of these—and then she lit a smoky oil lamp and led them up a narrow stair to a small room with a steeply slanted roof and two beds, two chairs, a little table about two feet square with a small china basin and a pitcher of water on it, and only one window—and that one only about six inches wide and three feet tall. Ma Beaker set the lamp down on the tiny table. "You can fill up the oil reservoir in the lamp once before I charge for it, so don't you waste no oil. I wash the sheets every Monday."

Wendy cut in: "We've been on the trail so long we've kinda lost track. What day's today?"

"Today's Saturday. You want to go to church t'morrow, there's a singin' and Bible readin' in the general store. We ain't got no preacher."

"What's the date?" Dipper asked.

She gave him a funny look but said, "July 26."

"And what year?" Mabel asked. When Dipper elbowed her, she added, "My head's real messed up from the dysentery! Ah-hah-hah!"

Ma Beaker sighed. "It's Saturday, July 26, 1862."

She told them they'd missed breakfast and dinner wouldn't be ready until six o'clock, and then she left them.

"Where's the bathroom?" Mabel asked.

"It's probably in the back yard," Dipper told her. "It'll be an outhouse, Mabel. No plumbing."

"Whaaat? You're kidding me! Uh—you _have_ to be kidding me!"

"He's right," Wendy said. "C'mon, Mabes. It's a step above campin', you gotta admit."

"OK," Mabel said, squirming. "Come and show me."

They went downstairs, out, and around back, and sure enough, a much smaller structure stood about fifty feet off from the house. It had a wooden door with a crescent-moon cut-out. "That's it?" Mabel asked.

"Yeah," Dipper said. "It'll be like the portable potties Grunkle Stan had at the Shack before the downstairs bathrooms were ready."

Mabel took a deep breath. "Wish me luck. I'm going in."

"Oh, Mabel!" Wendy called. "Be careful about splinters."

Mabel made a scrunchy face, but gingerly opened the door and vanished inside.

Dipper rubbed the back of his neck and tried to smile at Wendy. "So—we're married, huh?"

"Let 'em think that," Wendy told him. She grinned. "But me an' Mabes will sleep in one bed and you'll sleep in the other one. _Alone_."

"I wasn't thinking that!"

"It's OK, man," Wendy said. She took both his hands in hers. _They married young back then, Dip_.

_—But we have to get back to our own time. We can't just—you know. Pretend to be married. I mean, not pretend with each other!_

_Yeah, I know. But remember, I gotta call you Mr. Mason. That's how old-timey wives talked to their husbands. You can just call me Wendy._

_—Actually, I don't think I can. The name Wendy wasn't invented yet._

_Huh?_

_—I read somewhere that the writer J.M. Barrie invented it for the girl in_ Peter Pan. _And that wasn't written until after 1900, I think._

_You're kiddin' me, right? I never knew that! So—what do you call me?_

_—How about you're Gwendolyn? Uh, and maybe I could call you Gwendy for short. That's closer to your real name than the one you gave me. Ursus? Really?_

_Means "the bear," doesn't it? And the Big Dipper is Ursus Major. We'll remind Mabes to call you "Brother" instead of "Brobro," and she can just be Mabel, right?_

_—Yeah. Her name goes way back, and it's better than "Awesome." So—what's our plan?_

_Dunno, dude. You're the planning guru. But I'd say our goals are to find out as much as we can about whatever's killin' people down at the bridge—and those spooky wraith things that came after us—and the three guys who found a secret mine, and one of them killed the other two. 'Cause somehow getting back home must be tied in with all that, right?_

_—Right. It must be. I kind of feel it in my gut._

And there matters rested for a moment, with them holding hands and staring at each other.

Until from inside the outhouse Mabel's anguished yell broke the silence: "Augghh! There's no paper!"

* * *

**Chapter 9: Silver and Iron**

Luckily, Mabel had stuffed a couple of packets of tissues in Dipper's haversack (as she insisted on calling it), and Wendy brought one to her. After Mabel emerged from the outhouse, gasping for fresh air, they strolled around and looked over the little town—which took about ten minutes total—and as Wendy and Mabel walked on, Dipper lingered in the blacksmith's forge, where a guy who had muscles like Dan Corduroy's, but with badly singed jet-black hair and beard and a face scarred into a moonscape by ancient burns, had just finished pounding out a horseshoe.

The place smelled of fire and iron, and it probably had never been swept out. The floor under a bench lay beneath a blanket of glittering gray dust, which at closer inspection turned out to be iron filings. The anvil had been battered by years of pounding out horseshoes and probably iron pokers and other implements. The blacksmith looked as hammered-out as his tools. He wiped his pockmarked face with a grimy bandanna and growled, "You come for something or you just enjoy watchin' somebody else work?"

"I've got a job for you, if you can do it," Dipper said. "And if I can afford it." He explained what he wanted.

"You work the bellows, then," the blacksmith said. "Hard!"

So Dipper pumped, and when the fire was hot enough to make Dipper think he was about to burst into flame himself, the blacksmith very quickly and with a surprisingly delicate touch made what Dipper asked for in exchange for a quarter and a silver twenty-cent piece. Dipper hadn't even known they ever made twenty-cent pieces, but he handed one over gladly.

He caught up with Mabel and Wendy outside the mine works, where a steam engine had been started up. It chuffed harshly, sending billows of gray smoke spilling into the air. Inside the building, some deafening machine clanked and made pounding sounds. "They brought out some rocks and stuff," Mabel yelled over the roar. "Then they put them into this machine. Hey, did you notice that little waterfall up there before?"

Dipper looked up on the side of the mountain and shook his head. It really was a spouting spring, like theirs on the grassy hill, and it didn't fall free, because a wooden chute had been fixed beneath it to catch and funnel the water down into the structure at the foot of the mountain. "Must be what they call a sluice," he yelled back. "This is a stamping mill. It crushes the ore, and then the water washes away the dirt and lighter stuff and leaves the heavy gold."

"Too loud!" Wendy said, wincing. "Like Robbie's garage when the Tombstones were first starting out as a band!"

They walked away from the noise and went back down the wagon track to look at the bridge and the opposite shore—where they saw no sign of the invisible horror—and then, before they started back, Dipper coughed. "Uh, Wendy, since we're, you know, supposed to be married and all—this isn't much, but—if you don't want to wear it, you don't have to." He reached for her left hand.

She gave him a quizzical smile. _What're you playing at, Dip?_

_—One day I want to replace this with a real one._

He slipped the slim silver band onto her ring finger. Through sheer luck, or maybe the Love God was flying over and smiled down on him in the blacksmith's forge, it was a perfect fit. "Blacksmith made this for me out of a coin," he said.

"Go on and kiss the bride!" Mabel said, shoving her brother. "Darn it, I left my phone in my backpack! What a scrapbookprotunity!"

"I do," Wendy said, and she kissed him.

_Man, I want you so bad right now!_

_—I wish this was real!_

_We gotta hang in there, Dipper. Even though my Dad wouldn't ever know what we were up to right now, we promised each other._

They ended the kiss, and Dipper said aloud, "Yeah. It's a promise."

"Mazel tov!" Mabel yelled, and the mountain echoed her voice.

At six, Ma Beaker rang the dinner bell—an iron triangle hanging on a string on the back porch—and Dipper, Wendy, and Mabel trouped into the dining room, together with Ma's three other boarders: Jeremiah Lazarus, maybe twenty years old and trying hard to grow an auburn-colored beard on his sun-reddened face, Mr. Lafayette, short and dark-haired and in his thirties, a man whose English seemed limited to "Please" and "Zank you," and Diego Garcia, with a gray-streaked black handlebar mustache, a man who looked Hispanic but spoke with a kind of weird Scandinavian lilt.

Ma served out corn dodgers—sort of a cornmeal dumpling, fried golden brown in bacon grease—with greens that turned out to be something called "collards," sort of bitter at first taste, slices of pink ham (Mabel closed her eyes and ate it), brown beans, and a gloopy something called "chow-chow," chopped-up cabbage, peppers, onions, and unripe tomatoes boiled and mixed with vinegar and molasses. Watching the way the others ate the stuff, Dipper finally realized it was a relish.

The men all looked worried. Jeremiah at first talked to Wendy a lot—"I'm from Virginia, Ma'am, but I'm not Confederate, no Ma'am. My family and I lit out for Oregon rather than take part in this senseless war, and not to be a burden upon them, I set out to be a prospector. Where are y'all from?"

"My husband and I," Wendy said, pretending to brush her hair back with her left hand—displaying her new ring—and emphasizing _husband_ , "are from, uh, Missouri."

Garcia slapped the table and said, "Yah, den you know purty vell what it's like all over dis poor country, I betcha. Because part of Missouri wants to secede, and the other part don't, ain't it?"

"Right," Dipper said, wishing he knew more about Civil War history. "That's—that's real awkward."

Ma Beaker paused—she had been serving around the corn dodgers—and said, "Land sakes, child, you got your ring back?"

"Mr. Mason had this new one made for me," Wendy said.

"It's just the silver from a twenty-cent piece," Dipper muttered, embarrassed. "The blacksmith made it up for me. Just temporary."

Wendy smiled. "I don't want it to be temporary. I'll treasure it forever."

Dipper wanted to—he didn't know what. Grab her hand and run upstairs with her.

The others murmured their congratulations—even Mr. Lafayette, who said, "Zank you. Zank you, _mes amis_ ," with what looked like a congratulatory expression.

To Dipper's relief, talk soon turned to what was going on back East and what was happening in the Civil War—and it seemed that, in 1862, news did not travel fast.

"I just wish we had word on what's been happenin' on the battlefields," Jeremiah said. "The last thing we heard was of a big fight in Tennessee back in April—where was the place, Diego?"

"Shiloh," Garcia said. "And some of dem says the Union won and some says the Confederates won, and it sound like one big mess anyhow, yabetcha."

"What, uh, what business are you in?" Dipper asked him.

Garcia smiled. "For a long time dere I vas a sailor, don'tcha know, on the barque _Star of Spitzbergen._ I vas de only one aboard vat didn't come from Norway. Twenty year I vas aboard her, started out ven I vas yust ten years old as a cabin boy, don'tcha know, and by golly, I vorked my vay up to t'ird mate, but our last voyage 'round the Horn vas too stormy for me! Ven ve docked in San Francisco, de old barque leakin' like a _sil_ —no, dat's not English, it's a what do you call him, sieve, I mean—vell, I say, 'I'm not gonna be no sailor no more,' and by Jiminy, I go on horse overland all de vay up to Portland and den sell de horse and turn and valk inland until I can't see no ocean never no more, and I say to myself, 'Ven I get to dat place, I'll be a farmer,' and here I am, by golly."

"With all this trouble down at the bridge, we are surely going to need your vegetables, Mr. Garcia," Ma Beaker told him as she sat down and poured herself a cup of coffee that looked more like used motor oil. "If you can only find a patch of ground and start to farm it!"

Garcia wiped some crumbs from his thick mustache with the back of his hand instead of a napkin. "Yah, vell, I'm gonna buy me some land soon's I can. I got my eye on that place off to the north, ya know. Eighty acres of good bottom land dere! Mr. Venner, he want five cents an acre for it, so I need me about a hundred dollar to buy it an' build me a little house. I just got to get a stake together first, so I vork in de mine ven I can an' go prospecting ven dey lay me off."

Mr. Lafayette took a brass-bound watch from his pocket and held it up, pointing at the time: 6:35. "Please?"

"Thank you, sir," Jeremiah said. "Mr. Mason, you're right young, I perceive—uh, I do beg your pardon, but how old are you?"

Dipper opened his mouth, but Wendy cut in fast: "Mr. Mason just turned eighteen. All his folks look young for their age."

"I'm eighteen, too," Mabel said. "And I'm on the look-out for a husband, y'all! Any man here interested in courtin'?"

Jeremiah gave her a strained smile, but he spoke to Dipper: "Well, sir, I was out on my own at your age, too, and I meant no offense."

"None taken," Dipper said.

Jeremiah nodded. "Thank you, sir. Well, I do hope you'll come along to the meetin' tonight, seven o'clock. All the menfolk of Plenty are getting' together in the stamp mill to talk about the boogeyman at the bridge and what to do about it."

"Please?" asked Lafayette. "Boo-gee-man? _Hein_?"

Garcia told him, "Mr. Lazarus means, uh, you know, scary thing. _Svart devel_ , how you say it Spanish, hobby-gobbylin, oh yah, _diablo de la noche_."

"Ah, _oui!_ " Lafayette said, nodding and looking troubled. " _La bête cannibale_!"

"He must be from Boston," Ma Beaker said to Wendy. "I never could understand a one of them Boston folks."

"No, Ma'am, I believe that is French," Jeremiah told her in a kind voice. "He says, if I understand him correctly, 'the man-eatin' beast.'"

 _Close enough_ , Dipper thought. He noticed Jeremiah still looking at him quizzically and remembered his question. "Uh, I reckon I'll mosey along there with you," he said. "'Course, I don't rightly know what to do about the crea—I mean critter. 'Cept I 'spect it fears cold iron."

"What?" Ma Beaker asked him, giving him a hard stare. "What in Tunket do you mean by that, Mr. Mason?"

"Well," Dipper said, aware that everyone was staring at him, "it's ancient lore, don't you know? Old wisdom passed down. From what I hear, this is a mighty strange, uh, critter. Invisible, like—or it just comes out at night. I've heard, uh, heered tell, I mean, that such things are allergic to iron. Just might be worth a try. I reckon."

"Iron?" Garcia asked, raising his bushy eyebrows. "Oh, yah, de sailors talk about dat, too. Iron can quench de St. Elmo's fire, ya know. And dey say in a storm at sea, 'Touch wood brings no good. Touch iron, rely on.'"

"In Virginia," Jeremiah said, "we nail horseshoes over the door to keep evil things away."

"Yah, in Mexico, too!" Garcia said. "I remember from ven I vas little child, they wrap dem up in yarns and the iron horseshoe keep avay de—I lose my Mexican, all dem years vit de Norskies, vat is vord— _fantasmas_ , evil spirits. An', an' one sailor I knew, he said iron vas de only t'ing keep a _fanden_ avay."

"Come to think of it," Ma Beaker said, "I believe when they built that bridge, they nailed horseshoes over both ways in, up high inside."

"Yah, dem iron shoes are still hangin' up dere!" Garcia exclaimed. "I remember I seen 'em. Maybe dat's why de murderin' devil don't cross! But dey say de _varulv_ don't cross no runnin' water, neither."

Mr. Lafayette added something in fast, eager French. Dipper could only catch a word here and there, but one of them was _loup-garoux_ , and he knew what that meant.

Jeremiah translated it anyway: "He says that in France, the saying is that if you hit a—a loogaroo over the head with a rod of cold iron and knock him out, he comes to as a man again. What's a loogaroo?"

"Werewolf," Dipper said.

Jeremiah nodded. "And what's one of them?"

"A du—man who turns into a wolf when the moon's full," Wendy explained.

"Oh, like Lycaon!" Jeremiah said. "Uh—you know, in Ovid? Mythology? What did they call them? I beg your pardon, I was not able to complete my college education owing to the outbreak of the war. I have it! Lycanthrope. One who changes from a wolf into a man, or, one must suppose, vice-versa. That is a Greek term, sir."

"It means the same as 'werewolf,'" Dipper said, nodding. "In Old English, Were is man and wolf is, well, wolf. In Greek, the lycan part is wolf, and the anthrope is man." At Jeremiah's surprised expression, Dipper added, "I, uh, I didn't get to go to college. But I've done a lot of reading on my own. By, uh, the Great Horn Spoon!" _Wish I'd paid more attention to Old Man McGucket when he was just a crazy-jabbering hillbilly!_

Garcia leaned on the table. "But this _morder_ , this, no, dat is Norsk, what is dat English vord—this killer, it is not a _varulv_! Uh, pardon, vere-volf, I mean. Is it?"

"Nobody knows what it is," Ma Beaker said darkly. "Nobody's seen nothin' of it but footprints an' the dead it leaves behind. But I tell you this: It ain't of this natural Earth! It's somethin' fearsome and dark, and if Mr. Mason says we can kill it with iron, we oughta try it!"

"You gotta tell Mr. Vanbrook 'bout that, sir," Jeremiah said. He extended his hand. "You may call me Jeremiah, Mr. Mason. I do not wish to presume upon my seniority, for you are about two years younger than myself, but if you will permit a question—may I know your Christian name, sir?"

"Uh—Ursus," Dipper said, with a glance at Wendy. "But my friends never use that. My family and friends all call me Di—" He hesitated, and then firmly continued: "Dipper. I wish you would, too." When they all stared at him, he sighed and pushed his hair back. "It's because I was marked at birth."

"It's a sign, that's what it is," Ma Beaker said, throwing up her hands. "Young man, the Lord marked you with the guiding stars that point the way to the constant north! Providence must've sent you to us in our hour of need."

"That's my Dipper," Wendy said. "Always there in your hour of need."

Jeremiah pushed back from the table. "We had best leave now if we are to gather with the other menfolk. Ladies, will you please excuse us?"

"We'll help you with the dishes," Wendy told Ma Barker.

But Mabel asked hopefully, "Are there any more of those corn things? They're good!"

* * *

 

**Chapter 10: Bridge of Death**

Dipper tried to come in quietly, but the door to the room creaked on hinges thirsty for oil. "Hey, Dip," came Wendy's voice from the darkness.

"Hi. It's late. Past midnight."

"Just a minute." He heard a rustle of sheets and then Wendy touched his chest. Her warm hand slipped up to his bare neck.

_There. Now we can talk. Mabel's been asleep for like three hours. You're cold._

_—Your hand is very warm._

_Let's lay down on the bed and you can tell me about what happened._

_—Do you think we should?_

_Nothing's going to happen, Dip. Not with Mabel over in the next bed, not three feet away from us._

_—OK._

_Got to warn you, man, this is not a first-class hotel. You lay down first and scoot over, and then I'll lay next to you._

She broke their connection, and Dipper felt around until he located the bed, then sat on it—it crackled beneath him, as if the mattress were stuffed with straw, which—he thought—it probably was. The whole thing sagged like an overstuffed hammock, and he moved over with difficulty. A moment later he felt Wendy lie down next to him. The pillow under his head felt saggy and smelled funny.

Her hand found his cheek.

_There we go. Gets cold out there at night! Your face is freezing._

_—Not that cold. It's just the difference in temperature. Anyway, there are about a hundred people in town, I guess. About seventy guys showed up for the meeting. There's no government, really, but the mine owner, Pomfret Crudup—_

_You're kidding!_

_—Nope. Chubby old guy with those muttonchop sideburns and a mustache. Anyway, he's sort of the unofficial mayor, I guess, and they talked about the last time they had this trouble. You know what? It's when they kicked three prospectors out of town. I have a feeling they're the guys involved in that murder._

_So—the monster is, like, avenging them, or what?_

_—Don't know. But I spoke up, and most of them thought I was crazy. They're going to form a hunting party. Last time the thing hung around the bridge for two or three weeks. Nobody in town even tried to get out after one guy vanished. And they saw a couple of people coming down the trail get killed, but they were too far away to make out details. Whatever it was killed one man driving a wagon with food and supplies—and killed and ate his mules, too. Then one day it just went away._

_Dude! Wait, why did they think you were crazy?_

_—All the talk about cold iron. A few of the men said they'd heard about cold iron and junk, but Crudup's convinced it's just a grizzly bear or something like that. He says they'll kill it with hot lead, not cold iron. He's rounding up about ten men to go out on Monday—he says it's sacrilegious to do it on the Sabbath—armed with rifles and shotguns to hunt the bear down._

_Dipper, they're all gonna die!_

_—Tried to warn them._

_What—what are you planning?_

_—Nothing._

_Dude! Come on. You can't hold out on me._

Dipper sighed. _—OK. I've got an idea, but it might not work. Do you know anything about firearms?_

_Just what my dad taught me. Which is about everything there is._

_—Do you think you'd know how to load a scattergun?_

_Like an old-timey shotgun? Yeah, I probably could figure that out._

_—Well, I'm buying one, and some powder and cartidges. I'm going to go—_

_No, you are not._

_—Wendy, if I don't try, ten men are going to get slaughtered._

_You're not gonna go alone!_

_—I can't let you come with me. It's too dangerous._

_Dude, I got my axe. It's steel—close enough to cold iron, you think? We goin' now?_

_—Wendy! I—_

Her lips found his.

_Shut up, dude. Just shut up. I'm still dressed. Let's go._

The blacksmith waited for them in the forge next to the livery stable. "Mr. Stark, sir, this is my wife, Mrs P—Mason."

The huge man looked them up and down in the light of a couple of oil lanterns. "Pleased t'meet ya, Ma'am," he said. "Your husband talked sense at th' meetin'."

"Thank you, Mr. Stark," Wendy said. "He's real smart about things like this."

Stark scratched his singed beard. "People today, they don't believe in the old-timey ways. But I been around, I come from Masachusetts through Ohio and then out through the Territories, and I seen things nobody civilized could explain. So I back your husband, Ma'am. I'll help him out. Mr. Mason, I've done what you asked me to. Got nearly five pounds."

"He's melted down a batch of iron filings," Dipper explained to Wendy. "And he's molded them into shotgun pellets."

"And give your husband the borrow of a scattergun," the blacksmith said. He held up a scarred hand. "I know, I know, you was gonna buy it off me for three dollars, but I seen you don't have much ready cash, and I'm comin' along with my gun if you're a-gonna fix that wen-ti-go."

"Excuse me, what?" Wendy asked.

The blacksmith rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. "That's what the Indians called 'em along the Ohio. Wen-ti-go, sort of creatures of the night that et humans. Fifteen foot tall they was, or so they always told me. I've heard tell that iron will hurt 'em, but silver will kill 'em." He said apologetically, "I mixed in some silver pellets with your iron, Mr. Mason. And I done this." He stooped down and brought up an axe that even Manly Dan Corduroy would have been proud to wield, a double-header twice as big as Wendy's. In the lantern light, it gleamed.

"What's that made of?" Wendy asked.

"Good steel," Stark said. "But I plated it tonight with silver. See, if you down a wen-ti-go, you got to chop it to pieces with a silver knife or axe, so's it won't come to life again.. Got to get to the heart and burn it, burn it in the hottest fire you can manage. That's how come the forge is gonna still be burnin' when we set out to find this thing."

Wendy pulled her axe from its sheath. "Better do mine."

The blacksmith raised his shaggy eyebrows. "Mr. Mason, your wife sure has got grit."

"She has that," Dipper said. "But she can't come with us."

"That's not even a question," Wendy said.

Stark reached for the axe. "This is a good'un. Sharp, too. How about I just give it a silver edge?"

"That'll do," Wendy said. "We got a little gold. We can make it worth your time."

"You can't go," Dipper said.

"I love you dearly, but you can't stop me," she told him.

Dipper sighed and took the hatchet from his belt. "If you have time," he said apologetically.

Stark melted a small heap of dimes and coated the edge of both blades with a coating of silver. Then he shaped the cooled metal into a keen edge. "Better get on the way," he said. He reached up to the wall and took down an odd-looking shotgun. "What is that?" Wendy asked.

"Colt's Model 1855," he said. "Five-shot revolver. Kicks like a dang mule. I done got five cartridges loaded and the caps set, got ten more cartridges and twenty caps in my pouch. Now, if Mr. Mason don't mind, I'll do the shootin'. He's a mite small for the heft and recoil."

"That's fine," Dipper said. "Thank you for coming with us."

"I ain't aiming to let this town die," Stark said. "I like it here."

They walked through the silent town, each holding a lantern. When they rounded the bend, they could barely see the bridge ahead under star-glimmer—just like back home, a new moon had long since set. They cautiously stepped out onto the bridge, and Stark handed the shotgun to Dipper. "Hold this a minute."

Dipper took it, grunting. In the lantern light, the blacksmith took a long pole with a hook on the end down from a couple of nails where it hung, and he reached it up to the rafters, hooked onto another oil lantern, and brought it down. "Nobody's lit these in a while," he said. "But it feels like there's oil in this one, anyhow."

He used his lit lantern to set fire to the wick of the one from the bridge, then lifted it back into place. "Other one's nearly at the door yonder," he said. "If you'll get it down and light it, I'll hold the shotgun just in case."

That relieved Dipper, because it was all he could do to bear the weight of the weapon. He didn't think he would have been able to fire it. "I'll get the lantern," Wendy said, taking the pole from Stark.

It hung high above from a rafter, but only a foot or so in from the opposite door. When she had taken it down, lit it, and then hung it back on its hook, Dipper saw the brown horseshoe—open end up—nailed over the door. _Is that the only thing that kept that monster out? Has to be, he thought. Cold iron._

"Dip, is your monster sense tingling?" Wendy whispered.

"Not yet."

They took a cautious step out onto the wagon track, then another. Darkness and ordinary night sounds met them—bugs, a low wind rustling the overgrown grass, nothing else.

Until they heard a clatter of boots on wood behind them. "Guys! You ditched me!"

"Mabel!" Dipper groaned. He looked back. She and Mr. Jeremiah Lazarus were walking across the bridge. "Go back!"

"Sir," Jeremiah said, "your sister is right. I heard what you had to say at the meeting, I believe you, and though I applaud your courage in confronting this thing yourself, I have come to stand with you." He patted his waist. "I have a .44 here that will speak in a tongue of fire to any evil beast!"

"Mabel, you stay on the bridge!" Dipper ordered.

"But you ran off and didn't even tell me!"

"Guys," Wendy said, "I think I hear something."

Jeremiah came to stand off to Dipper's left, on the far side of Wendy. She held her axe in one hand, a lantern in the other—though its feeble light barely illuminated anything beyond about five or six feet. Carefully, Stark set his lantern down at his feet and then straightened, bringing his shotgun up to firing position.

That liquid, gurgling rumble that Dipper had heard before was coming toward them—slowly, the way a cat approaches a mouse. "It's out there somewhere," he said.

Wendy added, "Guys, you won't be able to see it. It's invisible."

Dipper heard a click. Jeremiah Lazarus had drawn and cocked his pistol. "The long grass is moving—yonder!"

On the edge of the wagon track and the fringe of the lantern light, the tall grass bent as though something the size of a horse, or bigger, were crushing it underfoot.

Wendy began, "Wait for—"

The pistol crashed and spat flame, and Dipper jerked from the explosion.

Something in the dark roared.

"Where is it?" Stark yelled.

Jeremiah fired again—and shrieked as something seized him and flung him ten feet into the air—

Wendy yelled and swung a roundhouse blow with her axe, and Dipper heard it chunk into something and heard an inhuman scream—

"Down!" Stark shouted, and both Wendy and Dipper dropped. The shotgun fired right over their heads—

And like a nightmare etched in red-hot sparks, the monstrous form could suddenly be seen—wherever an iron pellet had struck it, a searing ember flared—

Fifteen feet tall, more, the creature had a head five feet across or even wider—that much they could guess from the constellation of sparks that spattered it. The beast roared, and Stark fired twice more, and then as more embers erupted, they could see more of the body, two stumpy legs, a barrel-shaped torso, at least one arm that ended in a great claw. Dipper leaped to the side, drew the hatchet, and threw it as hard as he could.

The thing screamed, and the spinning blade ripped a burning gash in its torso.

Wendy hacked, and her blow severed the visible claw.

Stark pushed past her—and flew up into the air, seized by a remaining, invisible, claw. The mouth, outlined in flecks of fire, opened to swallow him whole—

But Stark leveled the shotgun and blasted the two remaining charges into the mouth at point-blank range.

He fell heavily to earth. "Cut it to pieces," he gasped. "Burn the heart!"

Wendy tossed her axe to Dipper and grabbed Stark's.

The—heaving, bawling—thing—congealed from darkness, showing up in the lantern light for the first time—terrible, warty, great bulging eyes, a mouth like a huge shark's maw—Wendy mercilessly chopped into its flesh, making it writhe, but it seemed to have no breath to roar again. When it tried to claw at her, Dipper severed the other arm at the elbow. It offered almost no resistance, like a dry-rotted tree trunk.

The blacksmith pushed himself up. "I'll finish it!"

Wendy grabbed her own axe and Dipper and pulled him back to the bridge. Mabel knelt on the timbers, her mouth gaping in a terrified silent scream. Stark's sliver-coated axe gleamed as he chopped again and again, merciless, and then he stooped and straightened. "Got it!" The blacksmith came staggering in, clutching something dark the size of a cantaloupe that throbbed and pulsed like a wildcat inside a bag. "I'll go burn this," he gasped. "Find Mr. Lazarus. I'll send help."

Jeremiah lay on a round boulder not far from the bridge. "Are you OK?" Dipper asked, bending over him.

"I fear my back is broken," the young man whispered. "I cannot feel anything below my neck. Mr. Mason, how is your memory?"

"G-good," Dipper said.

"If you would be so kind, remember this: Dr. and Mrs. Frederick Lazarus, the Parsonage, Home Chapel Church, Strausburg, Virginia. Do me the favor of writing to them and telling them their son Jeremiah died in Plenty, Oregon and not in the stupid, stupid war."

"You'll be all right," Mabel said from beside Dipper, putting her hand on the man's chest. "I know you will!"

In the lantern light, he smiled at her. "Thank you for asking me to escort you, Miss Mabel. I hope you find what you are looking for. I surely . . . ."

He trailed off and did not speak again.

* * *

**Chapter 11: Night Gaunts**

"What now?" Dipper asked, his arm around Mabel.

"Dude, you're the man with a plan," Wendy said. "You tell us!"

"I'm so sorry for Jeremiah," Mabel murmured. "I mean, I didn't know him at all, but he seemed so kind."

Dipper felt some energy cracking in the air. "I think we're gonna have to get out of here soon," he said. "Quick, hold the lantern for me!" He reached into his outer shirt and found the ballpoint in his inner pocket, and he fished out his pocket notebook, too. In the yellow lantern light, he printed hastily, "Please write his parents and tell them their son Jeremiah died not in the war but fighting bravely against evil." He added the names and address that Jeremiah had given them and then tore off the page and placed it on Jeremiah's chest.

"It'll blow off," Mabel said. "Here." She safety-pinned it to his shirt.

"Wait," Dipper said. "Mabel, that may create a time anomaly! When were safety pins invented?"

"In 1849," she said impatiently. "By Walter Hunt, in New York. Sheesh, I thought you knew everything."

"How'd you—"

"Sewing, arts, and crafts, Brobro!"

"Guys," Wendy interrupted. "Uh, I think this monster's body's doing something real weird here!"

Dipper saw that the body was . . . burning. Red worms of embers crept over it, and whenever they encountered each other, the flesh puffed into hissing blue flames. "Mr. Stark's put the heart in his forge!" Dipper said. "We'd better back off!"

"Wait! I gotta move Jeremiah onto the bridge!" Mabel pleaded.

Dipper and Wendy helped, Wendy lifting the young man's shoulders, Dipper and Mabel his legs, and they moved him about fifteen feet back and to the middle of the bridge. The body of the creature hissed and popped and sizzled as more tongues of blue fire broke out on the surface—though the bizarre flames didn't give off any heat they could feel.

"Come on, guys," Wendy said. "Back to our hilltop!"

"Why there?" Mabel asked.

"Because it started there," Dipper told her. "So it's probably going to finish there, too! Right, Wendy?"

"I hope it's right. Hurry!"

They found the tree where Wendy had stashed their stuff and took everything down before making the trek back. Though they made the best time they could, it was past two o'clock in the morning when they neared the hill. They could hear beavers splashing in the pond, and a chorus of frogs and insects chattered them on their way. When they came within sight of Ghost Falls—though they heard it rather than saw it in the depth of the morning—Wendy doused her lantern.

In the dark, they reached the hill and climbed to the top. Just as they reached it, Mabel said, "Look!"

In the far distance, in the direction of the bridge, a roiling red cloud of fire erupted, boiling upward above the tree line. "It's gone," Dipper said. "The heart burned up. The wen-ti-go's body burned with it—oh, my gosh!"

"What is it?" Wendy asked.

" _Wendigo_! That's what the word was! Mr. Stark just didn't understand it right. A Wendigo is a monster the Native Americans feared. He was right, it's supposed to be fifteen feet tall and a man-eater. Greed and murder call one up—and they can possess people, or kill them and eat them."

"And you know this how?" Wendy asked.

"Come on, Wendy," Mabel said. "You know Brobert always has his nose in some book of supernatural stories!"

"Yeah, Mabel's right, I read about them," Dipper said.

"Are we back?" Mabel asked. "Is this our own time?"

"Somehow I don't think so," Dipper said slowly. "I think we'd have a sign or something. And when that ball of fire rolled up, I didn't see the bridge, so the trees are still taller than they are in 2014."

"Must be something left to do, then," Wendy said.

Dipper nervously asked, "Do you think our invisibility shield is still up?"

"Dunno," Wendy said. "But let's pitch camp. We won't bother with the tent—too late at night already—but we'll spread the ground cloth and unroll our sleeping bags."

They laid the bags out head to head and lay down as though they were three spokes of a wheel—two a little shorter than the third, true. Dipper stared straight up into the starriest sky he could remember seeing until sheer exhaustion claimed him and he dozed.

Then as the sky began to lighten, Mabel rolled over, opened sleepy eyes, and whispered, "Look, guys!"

Wendy woke up immediately. Dipper mumbled a little until Mabel, who was now sitting, punched his shoulder. "Ow!" he said—not loudly, as if he remembered they needed to be cautious—and then he asked, "What was that for?"

"There's a light behind the waterfall!" Mabel said.

Wendy rubbed her eyes. "She's right, dude! Look!"

Dipper had to orient himself, but then he glimpsed the dim orange gleam. He squirmed to his backpack and got the binoculars. Lying on his stomach, he trained them on the glow—and saw movement. "It's the guy!" he whispered. "The one we saw go behind the falls!"

The binoculars showed him as if he were about thirty feet away. The man had edged out from behind the falling water with his lantern. Then—Dipper's flesh crawled—the man set the lantern down on the ledge (almost level with the water) and extended both arms. He slowly raised them over his head, put his hands together palm to palm, and then lowered his arms forward, the hands straight in front of him, as though preparing to dive. Then he parted his hands and spread his arms wide again—and striding across the water up to him came the three stringy black forms that had come for the three teens the day before.

Now the man reached inside his shirt and took out a glowing green thing, which seemed to be on a thong hung around his neck. He thrust it forward and made a "come-here" gesture with his free hand—and the inky forms streamed toward him, floated into the air, and flowed into the glowing gem, or light, or whatever it was, like streaks of jet-black ink swirling down a drain. When all three had vanished, the man went back behind the waterfall and remained there for a few minutes.

Then he came out again, leading his donkey. They walked along the edge to solid ground. The sky had lightened to morning twilight, and now Dipper could see the bearded man pause and look around suspiciously. Then he twitched the donkey's tether, and the two plodded off to the left, away from the falls and the beaver pond.

"I think he's gone," Wendy said after twenty minutes had passed and the sun had peeked above the bluffs.

"He called those creatures up," Dipper said.

"I bet he called the thing that killed Jeremiah, too!" Mabel said angrily.

"So, what do we do?" Dipper asked.

Wendy thought for a moment. "Dip, what was that green light? You had the binocs. Did you see?"

"It was an amulet, I think," Dipper said.

Mabel gasped. "Like the one Gideon had when he tried to cut out your tongue with shears?"

" _What?_ " Wendy asked, her voice angry.

"Long story," Dipper said. "It's over now."

"Dipper!" Mabel said. "We have to go in there and find that thing!"

"It's dangerous," he warned.

"That's what makes it cool," Wendy told him. "Come on, my brave husband. If you love your bride, answer the call of danger!"

"What are you doing?" Dipper asked.

She punched his shoulder. "Bein' all damsel-in-distressy nineteenth century, man! Seriously, dude, those things are, like, unnatural. I get a real evil vibe from them."

"Me, too," Mabel said. "And we smooshed that big horrible toad thing, but what if he creates another one? Nobody would be safe!"

"Well," Dipper said, "we seem to be stuck in the nineteenth century, so I guess whatever's supposed to happen to let us go hasn't happened yet. Let's try it."

They had to search hard before they found the place where the ledge began—its first twenty feet lay concealed behind a heavy thicket of tall cat-tails, looking like furry hot dogs on long stalks—and then they followed it. No wonder the man had such a small pack animal. Anything larger couldn't have fit on that narrow level ledge of stone.

They saw that the falls gave them barely fifteen inches of clearance, and they had to put their backs against the wet rock to avoid being battered by the falling water. But after five feet of uncomfortable sideways edging, the rock behind them fell away and they ducked inside a low natural cave—no more than four feet from waterline to ceiling—and found it almost immediately opened up into a larger cavern, where they could stand up.

Dipper shivered a little. His camp shirt clung to him, clammy and uncomfortable. The cave was dim—the sunlight outside hadn't yet hit the waterfall—and Wendy switched on her flashlight. She swept the beam around to reveal a dry, sandy floor, a bedroll against the back wall, a smoldering fire pit near the entrance of the cave with Y-shaped sticks supporting a metal rod from which a cooking pot hung on three chains, a big rough table knocked together from pine logs, on it a tin plate with the remnants of a breakfast, a book, piles of clothing, a coffee pot, and other odds and ends. "Ew!" Mabel said. "I just stepped in something."

Wendy flashed the beam toward Mabel's feet. "Oh, dude!" she said, laughing.

"Aw, donkey droppings!" Mabel exclaimed.

Dipper made his way over to the table. "Bring the light," he said.

Wendy shone it on the book, which Dipper opened. "Hand-written. It's a journal," he said.

"Here we go again," groaned Mabel.

On the inside flyleaf, in an old-fashioned copperplate handwriting, were the words _Adolphus Zickerhaus._

Beneath that were names of places, all but the last one crossed out: _Grand Island. Bighorn Creek. Summit Valley. Yuba River._ The remaining one was _Gravity Falls Valley._

"Must be places where the guy prospected," Wendy said.

Dipper leafed through the first few pages. "Here are notes on how to find gold in stream beds. Some figures. Ounces and money—guess that's a record of the gold he found. Huh. More place names. _Where Dry Gulch runs into South Fork of Clearwater,_ directions like that. Look here: He wrote _Took 20 oz in nuggets from S Fork but Johnson wanted to split it and we fought. Had to flee following his drowning_."

"Twenty ounces of gold," Mabel said. "And he killed somebody named Johnson!"

"Whoa!" Dipper said as he turned another page. "Listen to this." And he read,

 _Met sick Indian named Biaisa_ (Dipper stumbled over the word) _in the wild country of Hells Canyon on the Snake. The Shoshone exiled him for practicing bad medicine. He was in a desperate way, hurt and starving, but thinking he might be more use to me alive than dead, I fed him and splinted his broken leg. He speaks some English and told me he was a powerful medicine man but his people had turned on him. I thought him crazed at first but he showed me enough to let me know he has the real stuff. I did some magic for him, making the Voorish sign and opening a glimpse of the netherworld. Biaisa laughed and said that was nothing and he could teach me to make a Trine stone that could call into our reality the things we could briefly detect when I made the Sign. He says he will instruct me if I give him food and take care of him while his leg mends. I shall learn what I can from him, and then it will be best to dispose of him in some unfrequented place._

"Hells Canyon," Wendy said. "That's over in Idaho, I think."

"And he was planning to kill this guy, too," Mabel said.

Dipper turned the pages. "Here's some more: _After months of trying and failure, succeeded at last in creating the Trine of Trianguli. The stone was inert until I bathed it in my own blood. Tonight I called and banished a Night Gaunt, a kind of ghost being made of some swirling black matter. Biaisa is gloating. He warns me these things are dangerous to control. They can pull the soul from a man, he says, and leave him a mindless helpless idiot, or if unleashed they can physically dismember a human. He has no heart for this job himself and I think is a coward, but he believes I will use this creature and its fellows to exact vengeance on his tribe for expelling him. The fool believes he is using me. Instead I shall summon more Gaunts in the next few days (summoning and controlling them is a great strain and I must rest until attempting again) and see if I can command them to rip Biaisa to pieces. He knows too much about me_."

A few pages later, Dipper swallowed hard. "He says, _It is done. No fragment of Biasa larger than a playing card is left even bones pulverized and shattered. Let the buzzards and coyotes feast on the remains_. Guys, that's only about ten pages from the end! Not long ago he killed somebody named Biaisa! Whoa, listen to this: _The townspeople are spying on me again. If they find my gold they will steal it all. I must find two or three partners who might be of use in guarding my stronghold until I destroy that cursed settlement and all who dwell in it! I shall call up the Kha'umsh once more. I fear it, for it is too stupid to control, but I shall set it on the people of Plenty. It will stay within a few feet of where I call it up until it dissolves again in a month or two. I know it cannot cross the bridge over river, but it can lurk nearby and starve them out. Maybe it will eat the three spies who saw me today and who summoned a great wind to hinder my Gaunts_." Dipper looked up from the book. "That's the last entry!"

"He called up those grunts!" Mabel exclaimed.

"Gaunts," Dipper corrected. "Yeah, and the Kha'umsh must be that shark-mouthed giant toad thing!"

"Dudes, we didn't call up any wind," Wendy said.

"He doesn't know that, though. Wait, he has to use that Trine thing to control the Gaunts!" Dipper frantically searched through the filthy clothes scattered on the rough table. "It has to be here," he said. "Unless he wears it around his neck!"

"The amulet thingy?" Mabel asked.'

"Yes! Without that he can't call up the Gaunts!"

After half an hour of careful search, they couldn't find it anywhere—though Mabel turned up a leather saddlebag almost too heavy to lift, with leather bags of gold nuggets inside.

"Leave it," Dipper said. "If we get greedy, we're lost."

"We'd better get out of here," Wendy said in a nervous voice. "No tellin' how long he'll be gone."

"We'll go up on the hill and watch for him," Mabel said, "and if we get a chance, we'll jump him and hold him down and search him for the amulet!"

Dipper ducked beneath the low entrance of the cave and immediately drew back.

"Too late!" he said. "Find somewhere to hide—he's coming back!"

The roar of the waterfall covered everything, even the clop of a donkey's hoofs on the stone—but Wendy and Mabel believed Dipper.

The big trouble—the worst trouble—was that the bare stone cave offered absolutely no hiding place.

They were trapped.

* * *

**Chapter 12: Ambush**

You do what you can.

Dipper whispered hurried instructions, and the three of them scattered to different points in the cave. They heard a rough voice curse and say, "Come on, you ornery stubborn . . ." and something that was not a nice name for a harmless donkey.

Grumbling and muttering, the bearded man stepped into the dim cavern, his hat dripping water, the donkey braying in protest as the waterfall splashed him. Pressed against one of the darkest parts of the cave wall, Dipper held his breath. Though a rifle was strapped to the donkey, against the light filtering through the waterfall Dipper could see the man wore no sidearm. Good to know. Zickerhaus—assuming that was his name—slapped the donkey hard on the rear end. "Git in there, you worthless cuss!"

The donkey dropped his head, like a dog that knows he's done wrong, and slunk off to the side, the same spot where Mabel had stepped in his dung. Zickerhaus turned, mumbling, and picked up a pair of iron tongs from the sand beside the still-smoldering fire. Without even looking around, he fumbled on the table for a lantern. He set that down, bent over and picked up an ember with the tongs, opened the glass of the lantern, and blew on the spark until it flamed, then held it to the wick of the lantern. A yellow flame caught hold.

And in its growing light, on the sandy floor of the cave footprints showed up clearly, too small to be his. He stared for a shocked moment, then stood straight, leaving the lantern on the sand, and stuck his arms straight out to his side—

"Now!" Dipper yelled.

The nasty pile of clothes on the table heaved, and from beneath them Mabel launched herself. She grabbed Zickerhaus's left arm and her weight pulled it down. He drew back his right fist to strike her—and found that Dipper had run up and seized that wrist. He was a strong man, and he lifted Dipper off his feet, trying to shake him. "Quick, Wendy, while we can hold him!" Dipper shouted.

Wendy came up behind the man as he spun, reared back, roared, and tried to kick the kids or shake them off. She reached down his shirt collar, came up with her finger hooked around a leather thong, and used the little filleting knife to cut it. With a deft yank, she pulled a sort of locket from his shirt and stuffed cord and all into her jeans pocket.

He stopped struggling and the kids dropped his arms and backed away. Turning furiously, Zickerhaus raised both fists—then he saw Wendy brandishing her axe. "I wouldn't try it, dude," she said.

"You've come to rob me," Zickerhaus said, his voice surprisingly calm and level—even melodic. "That's a bad mistake, young'uns. People who try that on me die in ugly ways."

Smiling through his beard, he straightened his arms out, then slowly raised them over his head, hands palm to palm—

 _He didn't feel it!_ Dipper realized. _He doesn't know his amulet's gone! Maybe we can trick him!_

"Look, sir," he said, "we have no quarrel with you. You sicced something awful on us yesterday, three ghosts or something. We saw where you'd gone behind the water and came to ask you not to do that. We're lost and trying to find the town of Plenty."

Zickerhaus gazed at him for a moment, flicked his eyes toward Wendy—still holding her axe cocked for a blow—and then dropped his arms. "You didn't come to rob me?"

"No, sir. I don't even see anything here we'd want. We're hungry, mostly. We just want to find the town and beg some food."

"All our folks died," Mabel said in a piteous voice. "Of—of dysentery. Of the brain!"

"What?"

"She means typhoid, sir," Dipper said hurriedly.

He squinted suspicious eyes. "Brain fever?"

"Uh, yes, sir. She had a touch of it herself."

Mabel shot Dipper a quick glare that told him he'd be sorry later.

"Just let us go, man," Wendy said. "We wanted to tell you we didn't mean you any harm, that's all. We really didn't steal anything. You can check."

Zickerhaus backed up to the table and felt behind him until he dragged the saddlebag over and took a quick look inside. They had left his bags of gold dust and nuggets untouched. Then, making his voice surly—but Dipper heard a calculating, plotting undertone, too—he asked, "Will you just git, then, for good? Go straight to Plenty if I tell you where it is?"

"That's all we want," Dipper said.

"You won't tell anybody where I've holed up? People there are mean, I warn you. They'd rob me if they could find this place. Can't let you go unless you swear not to tell them anything about me—not where this cave is, not even that you saw me."

"We swear," Dipper said.

"Every one of you!"

Wendy and Mabel repeated the promise.

"Well—I see now you ain't but kids." Zickerhaus stroked his black, bushy beard.

"And we're on our own," Dipper said.

For a moment Zickerhaus stared at him, his dark eyes sly. Then he smiled—though it looked more like a grimace of threat—and said, "You didn't see ghosts, young'uns. You just got spooked by some whirlwinds, that's all. The waterfall causes them, I reckon. They sweep up water vapor and look dark and strange when the sun hits 'em wrong. But, sure, go on back to the shore and follow this pond off there to the west. You'll come to a wood bridge. My advice, just wait there on this side of the bridge until you see somebody coming toward the town or from it. They don't cotton to strangers in Plenty. Like I say, they're awful mean folks. Wait a while, and when you see somebody, go up with your hands in the air to show you're not armed. Explain who you are and what you need and try your luck."

"Thank you, sir," Dipper said.

Wendy went to the donkey and unlashed the rifle. "We're not stealin' this," she said. "We'll just take it off a ways to make sure you don't shoot at us. What we're going to do is go over that big hill there and take to the woods. We'll leave the rifle up close to the top of the hill, by that spring. You can come and get it after we're out of sight."

"You don't trust me," the man said.

"Sorry, man. We don't," Wendy said. "Like you don't trust us."

They left and climbed up the slope of the hill. Wendy muttered, "He thinks the toad thing will eat us."

"Or he's going to call on the Gaunts again," Dipper told her.

"I'll _brain fever_ you," Mabel grumbled.

Wendy worked the lever on the carbine and ejected the shells, which she left in a pile. Then, up beside the spring, she turned around and held the rifle up over her head, then laid it down carefully in the grass. Zickerhaus stood on the narrow ledge of stone not far from the waterfall, staring at them.

And the moment he saw she no longer held the rifle, he started to make his mystic signs with his arms and hands.

"Run!" Wendy said.

They topped the hill and fell flat on the ground where all their stuff was stored.

Zickerhaus hesitated in his gestures, his head darting left and right.

"Invisibility shield's still up," Dipper said. "He can't figure where we've gone!"

Zickerhaus finished his gestures and then shouted something hoarse and pointed toward the hill—

And nothing happened.

He frantically ripped his shirt open and bellowed in fury.

"He misses it," Mabel said.

Dipper said, "Wendy, quick, give the amulet to me!"

She handed it over. It was in the shape of three overlapping silver triangles, with a green shimmering stone in the center of the middle one. Dipper put it down on one of the stones they'd used for a fire pit, picked up another one, and smashed it down as hard as he could.

As the stone struck, they heard Zickerhaus's frantic, raging voice—

With a flash of green light, the two stones met again and the gem shattered with a silent explosion—

The whole world spun around—Dipper felt they were on a carousel whirling out of control—he grabbed Wendy's hand and Mabel's—

"Look!" he gasped as the world steadied again.

With no transition, the beaver pond deepened by three or four feet, expanded, and the grassy edge became flat stagnant mud. Zickerhaus was nowhere to be seen. "I think we're back," Mabel said, getting to her feet.

Wendy whooped, pointing off in the distance. "Yeah, dudes, there's the bridge! Come on, let's go find my car!"

Though the mud made them take the crooked up-and-down path through the woods, they made a lot better time on the hike out than they had coming in. They hadn't eaten anything—Mabel munched jerky and trail mix the whole way back, though—and when they finally emerged on the old logging road, Dipper said in a relieved voice, "The bridge is a wreck, just like when we first saw it!"

"I kind of wish we could go see what Plenty looks like now," Mabel said. "And I wish I knew what happened when they found Jeremiah."

"Probably never know that, but maybe we can find a way to look at the ghost town next time," Wendy told her. "After I get my head around everything that's happened—" she broke off, staring at her car. "Wait, what? How could I get a ticket out here?"

A folded white paper had been stuck under the driver's side windshield wiper. She plucked it out and frowned at it. "Huh. It's for you, dude." She handed it to Dipper, and he saw that someone had written "Dipper Pines" on it, with the date 8-31-2013 and a smiley face in a conical party hat beneath that, the letters and numbers and numbers in an odd-looking handwriting. The numbers had been circled as though for special emphasis. He unfolded the sheet and read:

_Pmbck mcivo jsfso zwnsr hvohh vspsog hgmci tciuvh ksfsf sozzm wbhsfr wasbg wcboz qfsoh ifsgl. Oaobq ozzsr Nwqys fvoig giaac bsrhv sakwh vofwh iozvs zsofbs rtfcao Gvcgv cbskw nofrl. Hvspw uqofb wjcfs wgoaw brzsg gpfih swbwh gckbr wasbg wcbob rhvsu oibhg ofshv stwsf qsseiw jozsb hgctv iaobg hvsfs. Wbqoz zwbuh vsgsh vwbug Nwqys fvoig qfsoh srhwa sobca ozwsg hvohk cizrv ojsrs ghfcm srmci fhwas zwbso pcih ksbhm msofg tfcam ciftw thssb hvpwf hvrom. HwasP opmcf rsfsr ashct wlhvwb ugpih wbcbs hwasz wbsWu chghi qywbh vsbwb shssb hvqsb hifmt cfmso fgobr Woaot fowrc tfshi fbwbu. Wgokw bhvsq vfcbc jwsks fhvoh mciDw bsghk wbgks fsqoa dwbuq zcgsh chvsq ojskv sfsNw qysfv oigvo rriuo uczra wbsgc Wgsbh mcipo qyhch vsdsf wcrkv sbvsk ogrop pzwbu wbrof yaouw qllll. Pmrsg hfcmw buvwg oaizs hmciv ojsoj sfhsr hvsgv wthwb hvsfhw aszwb sobrg ojsrh vcigo brgct zwjsg. Gorz momci buaob kvcrs gsfhs rtfca hvsqc btsrs fohso famko gtohs rhcrw swbhv scfwu wbozh waszw bsobr hvsfs kogbc hvwbu mciqc izrrc hcdfs jsbhh vohll. Cvpmh vskom, Nwqys fvoig koghv saobk vchoi uvhsj wzaou wqhcm cifcz rtcsB ohvob wszBcf hvksg hobrh vohvo rhcvo ddsbo zgcll. Mciao mvojs hcrso zkwhv Bcfhv ksghg uvcgh cfaom psmci vojso zfsor mrcbs hvohl. Whvwb yamqv fcbcj wgcfb ssrgh cuchc hvsgvc dllll. Wgvci zrbch sjsbz sojsm ciobs bqfmd hsrbc hspih ksjsp ssbhv fciuv ozchh cushv sfobr Wkobh srhch szzmc iWuch fsgqi srtfc ahvsC zrKsg hobrb ckWoa cbhvs HwasO bcaoz mFsac jozq fskou owbob roarc wbutw bslll. Voddm Pwfhv romAo pszob rRwdd sftfc amcif hwast fwsbr Pzsbr wbPPz obrwb._

"What's it say?" Mabel asked, trying to crane over to read it upside-down.

"It's in code," said Wendy, looking over Dipper's shoulder.

"More likely a cipher," Dipper said. "See, a code is like blocks of words that you have to have a key to solve. A cipher substitutes one letter or symbol for another. Like if you were using numbers for the alphabet, 3-1-20 would stand for C-A-T. Huh. This is a hard one. All five-letter words! Or almost all—there's a four-letter one, but I don't see any one- or two-letter ones, and the capitalization is weird."

"Can you—" Mabel began, when Wendy's phone went off, making them all jump.

Wendy looked at the screen. Her voice sounded relieved: "The Shack. Hello? Hi, Soos. Yeah, we just got back to the car. Took us a little longer than we thought. That sounds great—we, uh, ran kinda short on supplies, so, yeah, brunch, man! Right, see you in a few."

She turned the phone off. "Do we tell anybody?" she asked.

"Soos might not let us go out with you any more if we do," Mabel said.

"I think—Ford, for sure," Dipper said. "He'll keep a secret. But I want to do some reading first. And I'll go on the computer when we get home and see what I can find out. And I want to see if I can solve that cipher."

"It has our last year's birthday on it," Mabel pointed out.

"Late birthday card," Wendy said. "Dipper? What's wrong?"

"It's not finished yet," Dipper said. "I can feel it. It was too easy."

"Too easy?" Mabel asked. "Monsters and ghosts and a weird prospecting guy whose hobby is killing people, and it was too _easy_?"

"I could be wrong," Dipper admitted, tucking the paper carefully in his pocket.

"We'll worry about it later, dudes," Wendy said. She unlocked the Dart, and they stored their stuff in the trunk. She hesitated, sighed, and pulled the silver band off her finger.

"Uh—you can have that," Dipper said.

"Thanks, dude, but if Dad saw it on my finger—bad mojo, Dip! I'll keep it, though. And I'll wear it, but not where he can see it."

"I tried wearing a toe ring once," Mabel said. "It hurt."

"Pile in," Wendy said, opening the driver's door. "Soos says Teek's at the Shack today, and he's offered to fix us brunch."

"Yay, Teek!" Mabel yelled. "They say always marry a guy who can cook!"

"Dip, can you cook?" Wendy asked with her crooked grin.

"I'll learn," he promised.

Wendy did a three-point turnaround and they started back down the rutted, weedy logging trail. Dipper kept looking back over his shoulder until the falling-down bridge was out of sight.

And even then, he couldn't help thinking _, It's not over. Somehow, I know it's not over_.

* * *

 

**Chapter 13: Come from the Dead**

F **rom the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _Sunday, July 27: I knew something still wasn't right. As soon as we got back to the Shack, we had brunch—very good, too, Teek is a great cook—and then I went upstairs to shower, while Mabel and Wendy took turns showering in the downstairs guest bathroom._

_Now, I may not be the neatest guy in the world, but my bed WAS made up. OK, Abuelita probably came in and tidied, and it wasn't me, but the bed WAS made up. And I know I didn't drop any of my stuff on it. It had a blue blanket as a cover—no pattern or anything, just a light blue, just about a match for the blue on my pine-tree hat. Anything white lying on that blanket would have stuck out. This is important._

_Anyway, I went to the bathroom, showered, put on underpants and shorts, and came back to the room, and I KNOW it wasn't there when I went to shower, but there it was now, on the bed: A paper folded twice, like a letter ready for an envelope, and on it someone had written in bright red marker URGENT DIPPER PINES READ NOW!_

_I picked it up and unfolded it. Here is the message:_

_IT IS NOT OVER YET!_

_SOLVE THE CIPHER!_

_FINISH WHAT YOU MUST DO!_

_MUSE ON HISTORY AND CHECKS YOUR ANSWERS!_

_And that was all. I got that creepy cold feeling along my spine. What had we left undone? Well, we hadn't taken rock samples for Grunkle Stan, but that couldn't be it! We'd disarmed the wizard, we'd banished his Gaunts, we'd killed the toad-monster. I'd even left a note for Jeremiah's family. What else?_

_The cipher seemed to be the first part. I took that up and sat down at the table I use for a desk and started counting letters, because a lot of the time you can figure out a cipher by knowing that the most common English letters are E, T, A, O, I, N, S, R, H, L, D, C, and U, in that order. You can usually tell which are the e's because there will be more of them. As you go down the list, it becomes less certain. But also, the most common letters that BEGIN English words are T, O, A, W, B, C, D, S, F, M, and R. Combine these and you can make a pretty good guess that something like _ee_end is "weekend." It's sort of like that spin-the-wheel TV game show that Grunkle Stan obsesses about._

_But there were those odd X-es. Couldn't figure them. And the strange five-letter pattern—but then I realized that probably was intended to make it impossible to decide what the first letter of each word could be. I was sitting there, still without my shirt on, leaning forward, when Wendy came up behind and hugged me. "You're always cold, dude!" she said._

_I leaned back against her. "And you're always hot!" Her arms and hands felt wonderful on my bare skin._

_"What're you doing?"_

_I explained. "But there may be a key," I said. "That note about our last birthday—that's really out of place. Let's see, eight . . . hm." I tried some fiddling, but nothing looked promising. "OK, thirty-one is no good. Twenty isn't. Thirteen, nope. Wait—we were fourteen. Let me try that!"_

_"I don't understand," Wendy said, leaning over my shoulder as I printed out the alphabet again and started to count._

_"Thirteen, fourteen. OK, let's see: the first five letters are b, y, n, o, w. By now! It's a Caesar cipher based on fourteen! We'll have to figure out what the words are, ignoring the breaks, 'cause they put the letters in five-letter blocks. I mean BYNOW is obviously a two-letter word plus a three letter one, just written together to confuse things. Hang on."_

_It took me about ten minutes until we could read what the cipher said:_

_By now you have realized that the beasts you fought were really interdimensional creaturesx. A man called Zickerhaus summoned them with a ritual he learned from a Shoshone wizardx. The big carnivore is a mindless brute in its own dimension and the gaunts are the fierce equivalents of humans there. In calling these things Zickerhaus created time anomalies that would have destroyed your timeline about (t)wenty years from your fifteenth birthday. Time Baby ordered me to fix things but in one timeline I got stuck in the nineteenth century for years and I am afraid of returning. I saw in the chronoviewer that you Pines twins were camping close to the cave where Zickerhaus had dug a goldmine so I sent you back to the period when he was dabbling in dark magicxxxx. By destroying his amulet you have averted the shift in the r timeline and saved thousands of lives. Sadly a young man who deserted from the confederate army was fated to die in the original timeline and there was nothing you could do to prevent thatxx. Oh by the way, Zickerhaus was the man who taught evil magic to your old foe Nahaniel North west and that had to happen alsoxx. You may have to deal with Northwests ghost or maybe you have already done thatx. I think my chronovisor needs to go to the shopxxxx. I should not even leave you an encrypted note but weve been through a lot together and I wanted to tell you I got rescued from the Old West and now I am on the Time Anomaly Removal crew again and am doing finexxx. Happy Birthday Mabel and Dipper from your time friend Blendin B Blandin._

_"Dude, those are j's, not x-es," Wendy told me. "And that says 'wenty,' not 'twenty.'"_

_"I think the wenty was a typo. Wendy doesn't make sense, so it pretty much has to be twenty—that fits with 'years.' And the letters aren't j's or x-es, they're nulls," I said. "I mean, the first couple, I thought, were just tossed in to make the five-letter count come out right, but then they appeared in clusters. And the note that told me to solve the cipher added the line, "Muse on history and checks your answers." Not check—CHECKS. I think the X's are check marks, somehow. Muse on history . . . ."_

_"Dipper—the History Museum!" Wendy said. "It's like a pun!"_

_"A pretty lame one," I told her. "But I guess it may be right. Let's go . . . check!"_

_"It's closed on Sundays, I think," Wendy said._

_I grinned, thinking of Grunkle Ford. "I think I know a guy . . . . "_

* * *

 

Ford's, well, Dipper and Mabel thought of her as "lady friend" Lorena Jones was both a reference librarian and a board member of the Gravity Falls Historical Society, and she had a key to the Museum of History. Wendy drove Dipper over and they met the grown-ups in the side parking lot of the Museum. Then Lorena opened a "STAFF ONLY" door to let them in.

Wendy touched Dipper's arm and thought to him, _This place gives me the creeps, after all that Blind Eye biz._

_—Me, too. You know, we have to come back one day and see if we can retrieve everyone's lost memories._

_One thing at a time, Dip!_

They broke contact as the adults paused in the Native American Relics room.

"I'm still not entirely clear on what you hope to find," Ford said, adjusting his spectacles.

"Anything on the old mining town of Plenty," Dipper said.

"Well," Lorena told him thoughtfully, "if I were you, I'd start in the reading room. I'll have to unlock that, too. Now, in the Public Library we have digitized copies of almost all the books in there, but you'll find a few unique items, diaries and—oh, my! How untidy!"

The reading-room door had opened to reveal a small, windowless room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. A square table occupied the middle, with a green-shaded banker's lamp in the center. Next to the lamp, at a spot where one of the four chairs had been pulled back, lay a heavy-looking tome with a spine that looked like—a spine, really, actual vertebrae. The worn leather cover had been reinforced at the corners with triangular brass plates, much tarnished.

Dipper flicked on the overhead fluorescent light, then went to the pulled-out chair and looked down at the book. He read the title aloud: " _Dr. Crackpot's Book of the Damned_?"

"Now, that's just a trashy book," Lorena said. "I have no idea why it was taken down from the top shelf—" she pointed at a spot near the ceiling, where the rows of books showed a gap.

"Wait, wait," Ford said. "I know of that book. It's a collection of weird facts—somewhat like my Journals. The author's real name wasn't 'Crackpot,' of course—that was just a pseudonym he used to taunt skeptics who doubted him. His real name was Foy, and he collected stories from all over the globe of paranormal people, beings, and events that normal science derided as fables and lies."

"Was he a real doctor?" Wendy asked.

"In fact, he was a pilot," Ford told her. "He was born around 1895, and he started flying airplanes about as soon as the Wright Brothers made them available. He flew as an RAF volunteer in World War I, and then after the war he set all sorts of flight records. He mysteriously disappeared on a solo flight in, I think, 1938 or 1939. No one knows what became of him."

"So why did a pilot write this book?" Dipper asked.

"Pilots are different," Ford said. "They have a lot of time to contemplate the meaning of things, and they go all over the globe, seeing at first-hand stuff that other people miss. Collecting oddities became Foy's hobby, and he published this book of the best ones in—the late twenties, Lorena?"

"Nineteen thirty," she said. She added grudgingly, "It was not a best-seller, but it attained cult status."

"Books like that are interesting," Ford said, "because—"

His mini-lecture went on for three minutes, but for two and a half of them, Dipper was no longer really listening. He had opened the book to the title page and had found a square yellow paper about two inches on a side. It bore a note: " _Chapter 57. You have five seconds_."

"Five seconds until—whoa!" Dipper said. The note had exploded into smoke, silently.

"Dude, it self-destructed," Wendy said. "The book won't do that, will it?"

"I don't think the book's author left that," Dipper said. "It has the earmarks of something Blendin Blandin might do. I've told you about that guy—time traveler and worry-wart. Chapter fifty-seven, chapter . . . great, it had to be in Roman numerals, of course. So I'm looking for Chapter LVII."

When he found it, he raised his eyebrows:

_CHAPTER LVII: PLENTY, THE TOWN OF GHOSTS_

_In a remote section of the state of Oregon in the United States stand the decayed remnants of a once-thriving boom town called Plenty. Evidence suggests that in July of 1862, bizarre visitors from Somewhere bedeviled and besieged the hapless settlement and did away with, or kidnapped, or even devoured, at least four people._

"Look at this!" Dipper said, pointing to the last word in the first sentence. In light pencil marks beneath the words _In_ and _Plenty_ were notes: _X8, X9._

And a moment later the markings faded out.

"Someone's vandalized this book!" Lorena said. "And it's a valuable antique! Well, it's old, anyway!"

"Quick, quick," Dipper said, handing his pocket notebook and a pen to Wendy. "Write down "In, X8. Plenty, X9."

"Remarkable," Ford said. "Writing that fades once read! This recalls the use of the juice of tithymalus mentioned by Pliny in his _Natural History_. It was an effective invisible ink—though I've never heard of invisible pencil!"

Dipper said, "Lazarus, X1! Blend, X15! And they've written i-n after blend, so it's Blendin!"

"No way!" Wendy said as she made the note. She leaned over his shoulder to read the passage:

_Memories have dimmed, but survivors of that time recalled that on a dreadful night of evil portent, four citizens of Plenty vanished as though removed from the face of the Earth: Mr. and Mrs. Uther Madison, Mr. Madison's sister Maybelle, and a young gold-seeker named Jeremiah or Jephthah Lazarus. Fact begins to blend with legend as memories fade, but the following account accords with all the facts I have gathered._

"Uther Madison? Man, they screwed up all our names! Even Mabel's!"

"It's a real garbled account," Dipper said. "Let's see . . . . "

The story mentioned an "Indian shaman" and his amulet (X12) and hinted that he was insane (X5). "They mixed up Zickerhaus and the Shoshone who trained him," Dipper commented.

The book said, untruthfully, that an invisible cannibal had ravaged the town itself on a night of storm and lightning, maiming "hundreds of victims"—though the town held no more than one hundred, total—and that the four people mentioned had gone forth to battle the creature, and that " _in the darkness of storm, a great fire leapt from Earth to the sky, and none of them were ever seen again. Perhaps they died (X3), perhaps they had been abducted, but the effect of the visitation was to destroy (X13) the will of the people to remain in the mining camp_."

By the end of the chapter, they had accumulated quite a list to go with what they had: will (X16), him (X7), new (X11), never (X2), it (X14), help (X17), find (X6), is (X4), and has (X10). They had also learned that the imaginary Indian shaman had vanished, " _no doubt fleeing to the fastness of the wilderness to gloat about his victory over the palefaces_."

"Man, what a bigot!" Wendy said. "But what about this list of words?"

"There were seventeen X-es in the cipher," Dipper said. "They alerted us to look for corresponding X-es, and here they are. Now, the next step—"

"Is to arrange the marked words," Ford said, "in the sequence of the numbers."

Dipper jotted them down on a fresh page. When he finished, he read them aloud: "Lazarus never died is insane find him in Plenty has new amulet destroy it Blend(in) will help."

"That is wretchedly punctuated!" Lorena said.

"Here," Dipper said, quickly adding punctuation marks. "Lazarus never died. Is insane. Find him in Plenty. Has new amulet. Destroy it. Blendin will help."

"But he _did_ die," Wendy said.

"We thought he did! And look—the verbs are present tense—is, find, has. Oh, my gosh! Lazarus is still alive—today!"

"Dude, he'd be like a hundred and seventy years old!"

Surprisingly, Lorena said, "I am Lazarus, come from the dead!" When they looked at her, she said, "It's a line from a poem—'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' by T.S. Eliot." She blinked. "And it goes on to say that Lazarus has returned from the dead 'to tell you all!'"

"And of course, Lazarus was resurrected in the New Testament," Ford added.

"I . . . don't think our guy's name was really Lazarus," Dipper said slowly. "It must be an assumed name. I think we were tricked."

"But we gotta go back," Wendy said.

"No, I can't permit that," Ford said. "I absolutely for—"

He froze, his mouth still open.

From the doorway behind Dipper someone coughed. "I-I-I can't keep everything time-frozen very long," came a familiar voice.

Dipper jumped up. "Blendin Blandin!"

The dumpy man was disguised, in a way. He wore a red Mountie jacket, black-rimmed glasses with a big nose and a fake black mustache attached, a bagpiper's kilt, and thigh-high patent-leather boots. "C-c-come on," he stammered. "you-you've got to take Mabel, too. You're the only ones who can cr-cross that bridge now! I'll go with you as far as I c-can, but if the Time Anomaly Removal Crew catch me, I'm in for it! I m-messed up!"

"Wait, what?" Wendy said. "You're gonna send us across to face this Lazarus guy, but you're too chicken to come? Lame!"

"I-I-I've got a good reason!" Blendin shot back. "I'll tell you, b-but we have to get moving! Come on!"

"We'd better go," Dipper said.

They got into Wendy's car—from the back seat, Blendin said, "I've always l-liked D-Dodge D-Darts! Go! For the next f-five minutes, time has s-stopped for everyone else in t-town! Go, go, go!"

Wendy tore out, tires shrieking, and sped along, whipping around stationary vehicles. "This is actually kinda fun," she said.

"OK, Blendin," Dipper said, turning around in the passenger seat, partly so he wouldn't have to see the things Wendy was barely dodging. "If we have to go, what's your good reason for not coming with us?"

"It's a good one," Blendin said. "It-it's a real good one. It's b-b-because I-I-I'm s-scared!"

* * *

 

**Chapter 14: Out of the Past**

"Dipper?" Mabel asked from the back seat. "Hey, Dipper?"

"Shhh," Wendy hissed. She whispered, "He fell asleep, Mabes. Let him rest while he can, OK?"

"OK," Mabel said. They were halfway to the old logging road. She turned to Blendin, who sat behind Wendy and next to her, and asked him, "So how are we supposed to deal with this guy?"

"I-I-I don't really know," Blendin confessed. "But-but he's m-messed up the timeline badly. He was f-fated to die in an early Civil War battle, b-but he made some sort of deal with a demon and g-got exempted from death. B-but there are always catches with demonic double dealings—hey, I d-didn't s-s-stammer on th-that—oh, rats! Any w-way, if you can figure out what the details of this deal were, you have a chance." He thought for a few minutes. "I can investigate how this b-began. His real name might help you. Are you s-sure of the address that he gave your b-brother? It just might be where his people really lived. Let me see what I can do. I'll j-join you at the b-bridge. Don't cross it until I see you again!" He took out his time travel tape measure, set it, triggered it, and flashed out of existence.

"You guys know some weird people," Wendy said.

"Yeah, but some of them are dreamy," Mabel said. "Like Mermando. But not Blendin."

"Definitely not," Wendy agreed.

Beside her, Dipper leaned against the window and dozed.

And dreamed . . ..

* * *

 

The Mindscape was always a monotone world, sometimes sepia, sometimes a faded hazy blue. Any colors that showed up tended to be muted.

Except a certain bright yellow, in a triangle shape. Who now sported a tall black top hat and a . . . multicolored bow tie, a little reminder that his molecules and Dipper's had mingled at a crucial moment.

Bill Cipher leaned idly on nothing and whacked a red rubber ball with a bolo paddle. It made _thwacka-thwacka-thwacka_ sounds. His voice was casual: "Up against an Immortal, huh, Pine Tree? Tough."

"Bill! Did you come to help or just to gloat?"

"Kid, it's not a dilemma for me. I can do both at once! Hah!" The ball came back on its elastic and shot past the paddle. "Darn it, I still can't go past six hundred and sixty-five. Well, well, well, you got mixed up with an Immortal. You really put your foot in it this time, Pine Tree! I hope you like butter, because frankly you're toast. On your own, that is. That's the gloating. For the second part, yes, I can help. But WILL I?"

"I don't know."

" _BZZZZT!_ Wrong answer, kid! Try again!"

Dipper remembered that Bill always played by his own rules, which consisted of one: _There are no rules_. He said, "Uh—yes. Yes, you will."

Bill glared at the bolo paddle, and it burst into flame and vanished. The smoke coalesced into his walking cane, and he grabbed it. "Right you are! OK, I can't be a mine of information, but I happen to have a nugget or two about your Lazarus guy. You got to understand a few things: First, in exchange for not dying, he traded his emotions, just because a certain, well, let's say 'demon,' wanted to see what human feelings felt like. Second, and this is key, nobody can completely surrender all their emotions—the deep ones are still inside, but dormant. Third, why. Fourth, if you can get him to connect to his former life and his family and where he came from, the old homestead, all that sentimental jazz, you just might awaken his human feelings and snap the spell—if he really feels anything, he's broken the contract. Long shot, but what other shot you got? Fifth, if you don't, he's gonna do something nasty to you—or to Red or to Shooting Star, and in about twenty-four hours he'll be loose on the rest of Gravity Falls. Sixth, if any of this helps, and if you're feeling generous, I still need gold. A Troy ounce would be super nice."

"Wait, what?" Dipper asked. "What did you say about _third_?"

Suddenly Bill was wearing a baseball cap, gold with an embroidered Navy-blue B, on his apex and carried a bat over his, well, not shoulder, but let's trigonometrically say his side a-b. Taking a practice swing while squinting his one eye, he replied, "Why."

Dipper shook his head, but nothing cleared. "Why what?"

Bill smacked the bat against his nonexistent cleats. "No! What's on second! Why's on third!"

"Who?"

Bill swung and connected with an invisible baseball. It made an audible CRACK! and an invisible crowd roared. "Who's on FIRST, kid! Geeze, keep up, will you?"

"Bill!"

The cap and baseball bat poofed out of existence. "Hey, it was funny to your grandparents! All seriousness, that's all I can tell you, Pine Tree. Except I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

"Second base! Hah!"

And that made Dipper so mad that he—

* * *

 

—woke up. "Gah!"

"Oh, you back among the conscious?" Wendy asked. "We're almost there."

Dipper turned around. "Blendin, can—wait, where's Blendin?"

"Better to ask _when_ is Blendin!" Mabel said with a grin.

"This isn't some kind of dumb baseball joke, is it?" Dipper asked.

"Chill, dude," Wendy said. "This Blendin guy has gone back in time or some biz to find out something about Jeremiah Lazarus. He's supposed to meet us again at the bridge."

"Great," Dipper muttered. "He's supposed to be the Time Anomaly removal guy! I could do the research and let _him_ handle the tough stuff."

"Yeah," Mabel said, "but you know he'd mess it up."

"There's the bridge," Wendy said, her tone low and troubled. The Dodge Dart jounced to a dusty stop only a few feet away from the river bank and the crumbling old covered bridge, its entrance tree-pierced. As the teens got out, Blendin reappeared in a flash of greenish-white light, wearing a long gray coat with fourteen brass buttons and gold braid on the sleeves. Also, his head was on fire.

"Whoa!" he said, patting it out. "Dang it, my hair's all frizzled! I always foul that part up! Am I smoking? No? Wow. I spent over three weeks in the past and just got back from Manassas, Virginia, July 21, 1861. Th-this is a Confederate colonel's uniform I'm wearing. Just a minute, I'll change." He flashed out of existence and then immediately back in, this time wearing his usual nondescript light-gray jumpsuit and white boots. "There, that's a little better. All right, that was the first Battle of Manassas, b-better known as Bull R-run. That's where the man you knew as Jeremiah La-Lazarus sh-should have died in action. But he didn't. Because he struck a deal with B-Bill Cipher."

"That three-cornered rat!" Mabel exclaimed.

Dipper closed his eyes and sighed. "Bill Cipher. An interdimensional demon. Jeremiah got to be exempt from dying. Yeah, I know that part already. What else did you find out?"

"His r-real name is Jefferson Lassen. His d-dad was a minister in a Shenandoah Valley t-town. It wasn't the one he t-told you, but I tracked down the church in a little p-place called Harrisonburg. I saw a tin-tintype photo of him in their parlor, wearing the uniform of the First Regiment of the Army of the Shenandoah. His m-mother and dad were very p-proud of him. So when I was sure of the name, I flashed up to 1975 and checked the Confederate records on microfilm, and in what I think was the original timeline, he d-died in the first Battle of Bull Run. See, I knew that the person who apparently got his back broken here on that night was a deserter and that his failure to be in the battle caused major disruptions in time. B-but then, knowing who he really was and that he was listed as killed in battle, I went back to 1861, and I was there in the Confederate camp at roll-call on the morning of the b-battle, and Lassen was absent without leave. He didn't make his appointment in—where's the place? S'mores?"

"That's a dessert," Mabel said.

"Samarra," Wendy said, surprising Dipper.

"That's it! His appointment in Samarra! His rendezvous with Death. He ducked out on it. I did some more snooping and I found he and his friends had a kind of clubhouse in a natural cave when they were teens, and on the walls of that cave I found Native American pictographs of Bill Cipher. Eventually I tracked down one of his old buddies—that was in 1911, and he was an old man then—who told me that Jefferson had figured out you could call on this triangle demon and make him your s-slave. That's what he thought, anyway. They started to do that one night, but his friend got s-scared and ran out. He always th-thought that Jefferson went through with the ritual. That was just before the Civil War broke out."

"And he joined up on the losin' side," Wendy said.

"Well, his p-parents weren't slaveholders, but they were very p-patriotic toward Virginia. They were FFV's."

"What were his parents' names?" Dipper asked.

"Dip, is that necessary?" Wendy asked.

"Could be," Dipper said. "You talked to them, Blendin, so you must know."

"Um, y-yes, it was the Reverend Robert Lassen and Mrs. Martha Segars Lassen. And he also had a younger sister, Lavinia. S-she was fourteen in 1861. But, um—"

"What?" Mabel asked.

"But none of them survived the war. Not even the sister. They were all dead by January of 1865."

"So—why were you wearing the uniform?" Dipper asked.

"B-because I t-tracked down his s-sergeant just as the b-battle broke out and asked if all his men had mustered. He thought I was a big-shot colonel and t-told me that Lassen had v-vanished from camp and wasn't there, and he thought the man had d-deserted. But I couldn't find his time-signature anywhere. Then I knew for sure he'd changed the timeline."

"And now if we don't stop him—"

"He, he'll get out into the w-world, and more and more will go wrong with time until it all implodes in a super-paradox. Or else I may lose my j-job and g-go back to the Infinitentiary. B-but I'll be what h-help I can if you can s-stop him!"

"Thanks," Dipper said. He took a deep breath. "You're really not coming with us?"

"I ca-can't," Blendin said miserably. "See, I'm the one fouled up. I've already crossed five timelines with him, and th-that's the limit, s-so if he and I get close enough to t-touch, and if one of us touches the other one, we'll both be annihilated and there'll be a terrible rip in Time and Space and th-things will get horribly jumbled up. I mean, imagine a horde of Confederate soldiers charging into modern-day Gravity Falls! Or, or, you and Mabel could wind up caught in the deadly crossfire between the Union and Confederate lines at Bull Run! Or all of a sudden, the Confederates could have machine guns and airplanes and defeat the Union, and it would be an awful mess, and Time Baby would blame me!"

"Why would he blame you?" Mabel asked.

"Just because it's my fault! It's so _unfair_!" Blendin gulped and wiped sweat from his face. "B-but I did s-show up to straighten things out just after your encounter with him and the Gaunts and the toad monster, and that should c-count for something. That crossed his timeline with mine for the fifth time, right here, in 1862. Just after you three left the area, I saw him getting up, broken neck and all-he s-said it was his back, but it was high up on his spine, really, and he looked horrible, so I immediately put a Class 1 Limited Single-Person Time Enclosure around the town, focused on him."

"What does that mean?" Wendy asked.

Blendin swallowed. "He could never get out. It didn't affect anybody else, only him. He's stuck inside his own private time-bubble eternity that's not much bigger than the town. On this side, it ends where the bridge starts. And he's bound there!"

"Forever?" Dipper asked. "Hey, that works for me! What's the problem?"

"Well—not forever," Blendin admitted. "I, I didn't have the power for th-that. It lasts for a hundred and fifty-two years. And one day. Most I could do."

"Whoa, dude!" Wendy said. "Then it's gonna expire—"

"Just after midnight tonight," Blendin said miserably.

Dipper closed his eyes. "But you're a time traveler! And you couldn't show up and tell us this a year ago, maybe?"

"L-look, I have my hands full with my d-duties! I didn't even become aware of this until a week ago, in my timeline, when the notice to investigate came to my desk. All this sounds like I've worked on it for years, but really in my terms it's been just a few days. And the reason I'm just now involving you people is that I had to wait until now because technically, I'm supposed to be on vacation! My first one in ten of your years!"

"Aw," Mabel said, "and you wanted to spend it with us!"

"Well, c-close to you," Blendin said. "I'll stay here and, uh, guard your—this is a car, isn't it? Your car." He waved. "Good luck, guys!"

"We're going to need it," Dipper said grimly. "Come on."

He led the way to the horribly dilapidated bridge and wondered what would be worse—plunging through the rotten boards and dropping forty feet to certain death on the rocks below, or renewing their acquaintance with Jeremiah Lazarus.

To him it seemed pretty much like a toss-up.

* * *

**Chapter 15: Crossing the Bridge**

They came to the opening of the bridge and looked through. Dipper swallowed hard. Half the floorboards were missing; roof joists had fallen in places, and the center of the bridge sagged badly and listed to the left, so that in the middle you would be about two feet lower than when you first stepped on. The gray wood looked riddled with termite holes. The wrecked flooring reminded him a little of the decayed rails in the dinosaur cavern—or the Sap Hole, as Stan still called it.

"Blendin, if we go over, we can get back, right?"

"Y-y-yes! The dis-dislocation only works against L-Lassen. It, it keeps him from crossing, but won't b-bother you."

"OK," Dipper said. "Because we may come running back!"

Mabel grabbed his arm, and she was breathing hard. "I can't do this, Dipper!"

"Sure, you can," he said. "You ran over a deeper gorge when we went out to the pterodactyl's nest."

"Yeah, but I had Waddles as a goal!" Mabel wailed.

"I'm heaviest," Wendy said. "Let me go first. If I make it, you guys can!"

"No, let me go first," Dipper told her. "I'll hold onto something all the way across and test the timbers."

"What'll you hold onto, dude?" Wendy asked, grinning. "One part of the thing's as likely to fall as any other!"

Dipper shrugged. "Mabel, I never thought I'd say this—but deploy your grappling hook!"

"Grappling hook!" Mabel yelled. "I almost forgot! Uh—what am I aiming at?"

Dipper pointed through the bridge. "Think you can lodge it on that great big boulder on the far side?"

"I'll give it a try!"

It took her three tries, but on the last one, the grapnel caught behind a projection of the boulder and the cable held when they pulled hard. Wendy tied off the near end of the line around the tree that had grown through the bridge. "OK, Dip! You be careful, though! I'm pretty sure this'll hold us all, but we'd better go one at a time."

"Here goes," Dipper said. Holding onto the taut line with both hands, he stepped out onto the weathered flooring—and the plank beneath his foot crumbled as if it had been made of cardboard. It tumbled down into the brownish rushing water of Murder Creek. "I'll try the side support timber," he said. The framing timber was constructed from three long heavy beams joined together end-to-end with rusted iron plates and shapeless crusty lumps that had once been massive bolts and nuts. The beams offered about three good inches of space, and Dipper edged along this, feeling like a tightrope walker. The bridge creaked and groaned as he crept along.

Most of the flooring had gone in the center, and through the breaks he saw that one of the two stone pillars supporting the bridge had partly collapsed—on his side. Forty feet down, the water roared around its base in two foaming streaks. He yelled back, "When you come over, try the right side! It has support in the middle, and this side doesn't!"

The rusted steel plates crackled, and he could feel the bridge straining to support his weight. But then he was heading up the incline, hauling himself hand over hand, and at last he stepped onto solid ground. "Wait, and I'll relocate the grapnel!" he called back. They gave him slack, and he found a dead—but still sturdy—tree trunk that let him loop the line around it and hook the grapnel back to the cable. Now the other two could cross on the right side of the bridge.

Mabel came first, eyes closed, slowly feeling her way with her toes, grasping the grappling-hook cable so hard that her knuckles turned white. Dipper reached out and gave her a hand across. "Good going, Sis," he said. "I'm impressed you came second!"

"If Wendy'd gone before me," she panted, "I wouldn't have had the nerve."

Wendy came next, walking confidently with her long-legged stride, and the bridge held her heavier weight. "Piece of cake, right, Mabes?" she asked, nudging Mabel.

"Not any flavor that _I_ like," Mabel said.

The track they had followed back in 1862 . . . no longer existed. Ruts, gullies, and fallen rocks had erased it. But the outcrop was still there, and when they worked their way around it, they saw ahead the ruins of Plenty.

"Oh, no," Mabel murmured. "Everything's gone."

Most of the buildings had utterly vanished. Here stood a falling-down stone chimney, there gaped a cellar. The stamping mill had fallen to pieces. Rusted hunks of machinery huddled there like fossils of ancient beasts. One or two of the heavy log cabins still stood, but their roofs had fallen in. The boarding house was completely gone. Worse—

"Where are all the _trees_?" Mabel asked. "Where are the plants? It's like a desert!"

They walked past the ruins, gazing all around. Nothing stirred, nothing grew, nothing lived. Then Dipper stopped and pointed to a ruined but recognizable building. "That wasn't here before."

It was another log structure, this one with at least a partial roof, and a rudimentary steeple, though the windows and doors were long gone. "They built a church," Wendy said. "They must've found a preacher." They walked toward it, and Dipper saw words deeply carved in the cracked and weathered lintel above the door: Plenty Worship Center 1870.

"After our time," he said.

Mabel took his hand. "It reminds me of that old church where the geyser shot us up, remember? You and Soos landed in the—was it a piano or organ? And Grunkle Stan wound up in a coffin!"

"That one was in ruins, too," Dipper said. "Wait—you hear that?"

They listened. The place was eerily silent, except the distant rush of the creek and the sound of falling water from the spring that once had fed into the stamping mill and now trickled over the stone cliffs like a small waterfall. But beyond that, very faintly, Dipper could hear—

"Sounds like music," Dipper said.

"Not to me, it doesn't," Wendy countered. "Sounds like a chimp found an old guitar!"

That much was true—it did sound like a guitar, but one being plucked and strummed randomly. Mabel pointed. "I think it's coming from the gold mine!"

They stood nearly opposite the opening into the mountain. Dipper said, "Oh, yeah, when I went to the meeting, I saw that. Back then it wasn't visible from the street, though. It was under the big roof of the stamp mill back then."

"Should we check it out?" Wendy asked.

"I think we have to."

Mabel had wandered a little way off toward the old church. As Wendy and Dipper started toward the old mine, she said, "Guys? Before we go in there, I think you better see this."

They walked toward her, through brittle crumbling stems that once, maybe years before, had been tall weeds. Now they flaked away like ashes. Mabel pointed toward the ground.

A flat stone, fallen over, cracked and half-sunk in the earth, read "JEREMIAH LAZARUS D 1862"

Other tombstones clustered around it. However, unlike them—the Lazarus stone hung on the edge of a depression four feet wide, six feet long, and about four deep. Cracked, dry mud showed that in wet times it had collected water.

"They buried him," Wendy said.

"And it looks like he got out," Dipper whispered.

They all turned around. The discordant twanging of strings still came from the mine.

Reluctantly, they walked toward the sound.

"Will you walk into my parlor, said the Spider to the Fly." The voice sounded familiar, yet strangely . . . dry.

"Jeremiah?" Dipper asked. "Is that you?"

The guitar twanged discordantly. "Now, who would call me by that name? The last human being I saw, it must have been, oh, fifty years ago. More. And even back then, nobody remembered that name."

The teens stood just inside the gold mine opening—not a very big tunnel, and the daylight did not penetrate very deeply into it. "Dude," Wendy said, "come into the light and let us see you."

"Very well."

Dipper held his breath as he heard the slow, weary shuffle of feet. Beside him, Mabel gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth.

The body looked very much like that of a mummy—withered flesh stretched taut over bone. Shirt and trousers clung to the wasted frame. The head—it was awful. It did not rest atop the spine as it should, but flopped completely sideways. The staring eyes looked desiccated, dusty. The skeletal right hand clutched the neck of an old wood guitar. The left dangled loosely, and they could see it was missing three fingers—just the thumb and the forefinger remained. The blackened lips drew back in a ghastly grin. "I do not look ready to meet company, do I? Never mind. That shall change once I choose which of you to . . . empty."

"You're a vampire?" Mabel asked in a small voice.

The horrible face frowned. "I do not know what that means," the creature said. "I . . . absorb the life from living things. I leave them husks and I become young and whole again."

Dipper swallowed. "We know how you got this way and who you really are . . . Jefferson."

The mummy-like creature flinched at the mention of the name. "You have the advantage of me," Jefferson Lassen said. "How would you even know that?"

"You met us before, dude," Wendy said. "Don't you remember?"

"You walked with me to the bridge," Mabel added, her voice unsteady.

"I—went with you to the bridge?" Lassen blinked, slowly. Dipper could almost hear the dried-out eyelids rasp on the leathery eyeballs. "How can that be possible? I recall long, long ago—when my old comrade Zickerhaus foolishly summoned a creature that had to be slain—you three. I do remember. Are—are you Immortals, as well?"

"No," Dipper said. "We traveled in time. This is the year 2014. This is where we belong."

"I knew it had been a long time. A weary time," Lassen said. "Well, you are old acquaintances, then. My, my. I must apologize for my appearance. I made a little deal long ago, you see—I cannot die. But I can be maimed, oh, yes—Zickerhaus's _Kha'umsh_ did break my spine. And later the townsfolk buried me. I could not heal my broken spine, you see, without life force to absorb. And the worms and insects came to feast on me, and I took their pitiful life forces, but healing with such miserable morsels is slow, slow, decades. And then one night I tunneled up from the earth and seized a passing child and took its life force. And when its father came for me, I took his, and I was whole and sound again. But the townsfolk caught me and hanged me."

"Is that why your head's all jacked up?" Wendy asked.

"In part. And again, it took me decades under the earth to regain such mobility as I have. And then—the town lay empty and deserted. And I discovered I could not leave! Not in any direction. Some barrier keeps me from departing. Then an old and sick trapper came, and I took just enough force from him to try to end it all. I flung myself into the gorge to the north, but succeeded only in severing my head from my poor spine, so only flesh holds it to my body now. And the climb upward took my fingers. Not a thing lives inside Plenty—not a plant, not a bird, not a bug. Nothing to give me sustenance. But now you come to me, young flesh. I regret taking a life, but it is a necessity. I made a deal, you see, with the devil."

"You didn't," Dipper said. "You made a deal with Bill Cipher. Triangle guy? One eye? Yellow?"

"Now, how did you know that?"

"Well," Dipper said, "there are three of us in this mine right now who made deals with Cipher. Two of us found ways of breaking the deal. It's not too late for you."

"I cannot believe that," Lassen said. "I wish I did. I am weary of taking the lives of others and ashamed of the necessity. Yet necessity it is, and cipher or demon or devil, I do not believe that the being who gave me this power, this curse, would ever let me escape from our agreement."

"Wait, you're going to kill us?" Mabel asked. "I thought you were a—a Southern gentleman!"

"I am driven on by the flesh; and he must needs go that the devil drives." Lassen stared at her. "You call to mind—someone I once knew. And I am sick of this. I will make this proposition: I need only one of you. I shall take one, and give the other two a . . . head start, at least."

"Take me," Mabel said. "My brother is in love with Wendy."

"No!" Dipper yelled.

"I thought you two were married," Lassen said.

"Not yet," Dipper told him. "No, I'll stay if you let the girls go—"

"No way, dude!" Wendy said. "OK, Mr. Mummy Man, you can take me—if you can. But I warn you fair and square, I'm gonna give you a good hard fight!"

"Wendy!" Dipper took her hand and turned on their telepathy. _Take Mabel and get out. Get across the bridge. He can't cross it himself—not until midnight, and he doesn't know that! And I think I may be able to handle him_!

_I won't leave you!_

_—Trust me on this one. Please. Get to Blendin. Stay there until—you're sure one way or the other._

_Dipper! Come on, man! I'm in love with you!_

_—Then please, please trust me!_

He gave it all to her in a flash, and she let go of his hand and took a deep shaky breath. "If you're wrong—" She kissed him, and then leaned her forehead against his. _If you're wrong, I'll never forgive you, not in all of forever!_

_—Then hope I'm not!_

Mabel was even harder to persuade, but at last she and Wendy walked out of the mine, hand in hand. Dipper said, "You'll wait until they've had a chance to get to the bridge?"

"I don't mind. I don't believe they can cross the bridge, you see. The way has been barred. One may get in, but not out again. I surmise that is a joke played by your Mr. Cipher."

"So—Zickerhaus was a friend of yours?"

"An older friend of my family, who like me wanted to escape the madness of war. He was to join me in gaining immortality, but at the last moment his nerve failed him and he backed out. Instead he found a way to become a . . . sorcerer, I expect you'd say. I lost all track of him that night at the bridge. I do not know what became of him."

"He found gold but went crazy," Dipper said. "He killed his two partners."

"Ah. He had always planned to do away with them if he found a vein of ore. I staked him to explore for gold. We were to share. I never saw a grain of it."

Dipper pointed to the guitar. "You were trying to play?"

"Time hangs heavy, sir. But I do not know the instrument."

"It's way out of tune, man. May I?"

"Certainly." He passed the instrument to Dipper.

Dipper began with the E string. "You have to start here," he said, tightening the peg. "This should be an E." He plucked it. "Getting there. Almost. Almost. There, that's an E. Now move on to the A." As he progressed, Dipper said, "Is this going to hurt? What you'll do to me?"

"Not for long."

Dipper nodded. "If we have time, I'll show you some chords."

"You are fearless, I must say."

"No, I'm not," Dipper said. "I'm scared to death right now. But I've learned that if I concentrate through my fear, I can still get things done. Would you like me to show you some chords now?"

"I am impressed, sir. Young as you are, you have qualities I once admired. Yes. Once the deed is done, I shall have all my fingers again. By all means, show me some chords. It might be a way to while away the centuries."

* * *

 

"Where—where is Dipper?" Blendin asked as Mabel first, and then Wendy, crossed the old bridge.

"He's trying to handle Jefferson," Wendy said. "Mabel, stop crying!"

"I—I can't help it!"

"He—he—D-Dipper—I should go—but I can't!"

"Dude," Wendy said, "he showed me what he's trying. Could you travel in time and see if you could bring some help?"

"It's what I do!"

"Then," said Wendy, "here's what we need."

* * *

**Chapter 16: Side by Side**

**From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _It's Sunday night now. Before I turn in, I want to make these notes._

_So, when Jefferson Lassen and I walked around the outcrop—well, I walked, he dragged his feet and shuffled—seeing Wendy and Mabel both standing on this side of the bridge, Wendy with her axe, Mabel with her grappling hook, I thought "Oh, no, it's gonna go all wrong!"_

_But then I noticed the two figures standing behind the girls. One was very tall, the other sort of medium-tall, and both had beards—the taller one's black, the shorter one's gray-white. The first one wore a black suit and no hat, and I'd seen his face on a five-dollar bill. The other was dressed in a light-blue suit, but looked as if he should have been wearing a uniform. Jefferson shambled to a stop and asked, "Are those men who I think they are?"_

_"I see them, too," I said. It had to be Blendin's work, or so I thought. I mean, who else could bring Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee into the present?_

_Mabel yelled, "Dipper! Are you OK?"_

_Wendy raised her axe, and she looked fierce. "It's all right!" I shouted back. "Jefferson is trying to make up his mind!"_

_The two men stepped past—no, stepped right THROUGH Wendy and Mabel, and the girls didn't seem to notice, and that's when I realized they were ghosts. Maybe their being here wasn't Blendin's doing!_

_"Private Lassen," Lee said. He stopped and saluted._

_Jeff's return salute wasn't regulation—it couldn't be, with his head sideways—but he whispered, "General."_

_"Son," Lincoln said in a kind voice, "the war is over."_

"Dude, what's going on?" Wendy called. "You need help?"

_"No! Just wait!"_

_"I am afraid," Jeff confessed._

_"Of course you are," Lee said, and he sounded like a father speaking to a scared child._

_"That is to be expected," Lincoln added. "We're here to help you cross."_

_"We came because your father and mother asked us to help you," Lee told him._

_Lincoln added, "And your sister."_

_"Come," Lee said. "We shall cross the river side by side."_

_Jeff straightened—as best he could—and said to me, "Farewell, Mr. Mason. And thank you." To Lee, he said, "General, I have done terrible things. I'm so sorry now!"_

_"Your grief helps atone for them," Lee said. "Step out like a soldier now. It is time to cross the river."_

_Funny, but as Jefferson slowly walked between the two, he started to straighten up. I mean, he was changing as I watched, filling out and looking human again. Mabel and Wendy stepped to each side—they were staring at Jefferson and didn't seem to see the other two—and the three men walked between the girls and onto the bridge, which didn't seem to feel their weight at all. By that point, Jefferson was wearing the uniform of a soldier, and he looked as young and healthy as when we had met him in 1862. But then I noticed he was fading, becoming transparent, and so were the other two—and with a shock, I saw that he had left his body lying face-down just on this side of the bridge._

_"Is he dead?" Wendy asked, staring at him. Mabel moved to her side, looking fearful._

_I came up to them. In the time it took me to take half a dozen steps, the three figures on the bridge had faded out like a puff of steam—and the body had crumbled completely to dust, no longer recognizable as a human shape. "Yes, he's passed," I said. "He decided it was time."_

_"Better come across!" Blendin yelled from the far side. "I've got a time-freeze on the bridge, but it won't last long!"_

_We edged across, one after the other, without using the grappling hook this time—because with a freeze on it, the bridge couldn't break, though we did have to step over the gaps, and Mabel held my hand because she had to close her eyes—and sure enough, just as Wendy came across, Blendin did something with his wrist device, and we heard a groan, and most of the old bridge just sighed, leaned to the left, and collapsed into the rushing water forty feet below._

_"This—this is strange," Blendin said, staring at a device a little larger than a cell phone with a holographic sort of screen showing a complex readout of letters and numbers. "I-it's fixing itself."_

_"The bridge?" I asked, because it sure looked like it was in ruins._

_"No. History! S-somehow the people that Lassen k-killed are s-showing up as never having been killed! Even, even a trapper who died in the 1930s. I mean, he still died a little later, but of n-natural c-causes. Lassen didn't do anything to him. And a ch-child whom he killed in 1878 lived to be an old man before he passed, and the child's father lived a natural lifespan—all the changes Lassen made in the time lines have repaired themselves—oh, crud!"_

_He said that last bit because with a green flash, two guys named Lolph and Dundgren had materialized on either side of him. Mabel waved cheerfully. "Hi, Lolph! How's that digi-cod codpiece working out for you?"_

_"I am fine, thank you for asking," the time patrolman's gear answered politely._

_"Blendin Blandin," Dundgren said, his voice menacing._

_"Here it comes," groaned Blendin. "Oh, time-crud!"_

_Lolph added, "Time Baby sent us to find you and say—job well done."_

_"I, I, I can explain!" Blendin blurted. "It, it, it's not my f-f-fau—Wait, what?"_

_As if reading from a script, Lolph said, "You have cleaned up a record assortment of time anomalies stretching over a century and a half. This time line has been completely restored. We are here to time-commend you. Time baby also says you can take an extra vacation week off as a time-reward. Now we must go." But first he turned to Mabel and said, "Nice to see you, Gam-Gam."_

_"Uh, same here," Mabel said, smiling. "But you know, I'm not really your Gam-Gam. I told you that was just a trick."_

_"That's what you time-think," Lolph said, winking. Then he and his partner flashed out of existence and back into Time._

_"They gave me an extended time-vacation!" Blendin said. "Man, I haven't had one in a long time-time."_

_"Dude, you say 'time' a lot," Wendy grumbled._

_Mabel tugged at her sleeve. "Let's be nice. Why not start your exciting vacation at the Mystery Shack? Wendy here is the assistant manager, and she can give you a free pass!"_

_"Th-thanks!" Blendin said._

_"Dude, I never agreed to that," Wendy complained. But of course, we knew she'd come through with the pass. And she did._

_She drove us back and told us she wasn't about to go home until she had heard the full story. So, I told her what had gone down in the mine . . .._

* * *

 

"And now it's in tune," Dipper said, playing the strings one by one. "Let me show you three basic chords. Watch where I put my fingers. This is G major. See?" He strummed. "Now A major. Sounds good. Now D major. Good. OK, these are like building blocks, and you can make music with them. Uh—when the time comes, how do you do, you know—"

Lassen extended his good right hand, fingers spread. "I just put my hand on your face. If you don't struggle, it will be over before you know it."

"I'll try not to," Dipper said. "Here, let me show you how the chords work together first." He began to strum the guitar. "This is a tune you might even know. It's an old one." He began with a D chord, then a G, and back to D again, while he hummed softly.

Lassen's skin-and-bone hand had come to within inches of Dipper's face. Now he pulled back slightly. "That's 'Shenandoah,'" he said. "You know, I come from the Shenandoah Valley."

Dipper tried to sound mildly interested: "Really? It might sound a little strange to you. The words have changed over the years. I'm not a great singer, but let me try, OK?" Dipper played a short intro and then began to sing, improvising, making up lines as he did:

* * *

 

Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

Far away, you rolling river,

Oh, Shenandoah, I had to leave you,

Away, I went away,

Across the old Ohio.

Oh, Shenandoah, I miss my father,

Far away, you rolling river,

Oh, Shenandoah, I loved my father,

Away, I went away,

Across the Mississippi.

Oh, Shenandoah, I miss my mother,

Far away, you rolling river,

For she loved me as did no other,

Away, I went away,

Across the wide Missouri.

Oh, Shenandoah, I miss my sister,

Far away, you rolling river,

Too many years now I have missed her,

Away, I went away,

Across the gorged Owyhee.

Oh, Shenandoah, will they forgive me,

Far away, you rolling river?

With open arms will they receive me?

Away, I went away,

Far as the Crooked River.

Oh, Shenandoah tell them I'm coming,

Far away, you rolling river,

For me there'll be no more sad roaming,

Back home, I'll come back home,

Across the Shenandoah.

* * *

 

Lassen's outstretched hand trembled. Then he balled his fingers into a fist. "If only I could believe that. Unending life was such a temptation, but the reality is weary, weary and full of pain. My father and mother—my sister—"

"Jefferson, we didn't tell the truth. My sister Mabel isn't eighteen. She's fourteen, really," Dipper said quietly. "The same age your sister Lavinia was when you left home. I feel you, man. I couldn't stand never being able to see Mabel again." He played through the song once more and said, "Jefferson, you're crying."

"No. I have no tears to shed," Lassen gulped. It was true—he was too dry for tears. And yet a sob caught in his throat. "What is this? I've had no feelings for so long. Why do they return to me?"

"Because your deal with Bill Cipher can be broken," Dipper said. "You can break it and be yourself again. But to do that, you have to accept that it's time for you to go home."

Convulsively, Lassen, who had been standing slumped, straightened up. "My sins will fall on my head," he wailed. "Those lives I took—all because I could not care!"

"Now you do care," Dipper told him. "That makes a difference."

"Go," Lassen said, sounding lost in despair. "I release you. Leave me."

"No, sir," Dipper told him, standing up. "I'll go—but only if you'll walk beside me."

"You don't understand! I'm so afraid!"

"I was afraid, too," Dipper said. "I knew if you didn't listen to my message, I would have to let you take my life—but I would've done it because I love those two girls you released. I know that letting them go shows you have good in you. Go ahead and be afraid. You can't help that. But you can deal with it. Come on with me. I'll walk with you just as far as I can, I promise. It's time, Jefferson. Let's go."

* * *

 

". . .and then we walked out and you know the rest," Dipper said. "Blendin, how did you get Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee to show up?"

"What? Who?" Blendin asked, looking confused. "I didn't! Well, I did go back in time. I, I told Lassen's father what we were doing—he said he would forgive Jefferson for everything and said we could tell him that. But I didn't talk to any ghosts, and that, that was on the third day of January in 1865, just days before the boy's parents and sister fell ill and died in an epidemic. I didn't—so he must have—I don't know, somehow Mr. Lassen arranged it in the afterlife for those two to come and help you?"

"Can you do that?" Mabel asked.

"Who knows?" Blendin asked with a shrug. "It's in eternity. I mean, there's no time in the afterlife. I can't go there myself. I mean, you know, not as a Time Anomaly repairman. Because of the time thing."

"Dude," Wendy asked from behind the wheel as she leaned toward Dipper, "tell the truth, now. Did you really see President Lincoln and General Lee?"

"I really did," Dipper said. "Heard them, too. I don't know why you guys couldn't see them. Maybe they were a vision just for Jefferson Lassen, and I saw them only because I stood next to him."

"Did Lincoln have that third hand growing out of the top of his head?" Mabel asked excitedly.

Dipper glanced back at her. "Um—no. He had, you know, just a normal head. I don't think the document hidden in the vault under the history museum was entirely accurate."

"Aw," Mabel said, sounding disappointed. Then she brightened. "But Benjamin Franklin _was_ a woman! So that's something!"

"Dip, sing us the song," Wendy said.

Only then did Dipper realize he was still holding onto the antique guitar. He strummed. "It's already a little out of tune," he said. "Needs new strings."

"Yeah, and a new body," Mabel said. "Play, Brobro!"

Looking at the old guitar in the light, Dipper chuckled. "I just noticed something. You can barely read the name of the manufacturer here—it was in gilt lettering, but now it's just kind of a ghost of itself. The guitar is an 'Amulet.'"

"So?" Wendy asked.

"Blendin told us that Lazarus had a new amulet!"

"I-I thought it was like Zickerhaus's necklace," Blendin said. "I didn't know it was a guitar!"

"Amulet, shmamulet!" Mabel said in an impatient voice. "Play, Broseph!"

"OK, but it's gonna sound horrible with me in the car on this bumpy road!" He sang the verses through.

"Dude," Wendy said, "you made that up on the fly? Pret-ty impressive, man!"

"Grunkle Stan always says you don't know what you're capable of until you're one step ahead of death or the law."

"Dipper," Mabel said from the back seat, "Why don't you sing—?"

The guitar twanged. "Darn!" Dipper said. "G-string broke. No more tunes from this thing today!"

Mabel groaned, but she didn't push him.

In late afternoon, they got back to the Shack, and then later Ford and Stanley came over for dinner, and afterward Dipper told everyone the whole story. "I'm confused," Soos said. "So was this dude, like, a zombie?"

"Not exactly," Dipper said. "He was just a guy stuck in time, that's all. He couldn't make his appointment in Samarra."

"That was probably his dentist," Soos explained to the others. He chuckled. "Nobody wants to keep an appointment with the dentist, dawgs! Am I right?"

Ford ignored that and said, "I've heard there was an old ghost town up there in the mountains. I even heard the rumors that it was haunted. However, people shunned it, it never seemed to cause any trouble, and I never had any reason to investigate."

"Well, you can investigate now," Dipper said. "Providing you can get across the gorge. See, the whole town was on a steep-sided plateau butted up against the side of the mountain. The old bridge was the only way in or out—and now that's gone. Oh, Grunkle Stan—I also know now where a lost gold mine is hidden behind a waterfall."

"Lost gold mine, you say?" Stan asked, grinning as he rubbed his hands together.

"Yeah, and I think there may be some already-mined gold piled up inside it . . . but to get to it, you'd have to swim or wade through a leech-infested swamp, and there might be a ghost or three guarding the gold inside. And if there happens to be a lot of gold, I don't know how you could transport it out of there—it's very tricky. There could be all kinds of traps."

"Worth it!" Stanley looked at his brother. "You could rig up something, right?"

"Well, I suppose so, Stanley," Ford said, rubbing the back of his neck. "However, the associated risks sound formidable. And you have enough money—"

"Bite your tongue!" Stanley shot back. "Remember, we've already agreed to go on one of your expeditions to Florida next fall, and this could easily finance that in style! Now, let's start planning this gold mine thing—"

Wendy stayed until the dishes were done and the stars were out. Then she said, "Well-p, gotta go home and start catching up on the cleaning. See you early tomorrow for our run, Dip!"

"Sure. I'll walk you out," Dipper said.

In the dark parking lot, beside the Dodge Dart, they kissed. "Dude," Wendy said softly, caressing his neck, "I was so scared for you."

"I was scared myself," Dipper admitted. "But I thought Lassen knew as well as I did that the time had come for it all to end. That's one thing about deals with Bill Cipher: almost as soon as you make one, you regret it. I depended on that—and on what Bill hinted about Lassen's feelings. He was right—they were still buried deep inside him, just hidden."

"I tell you, man, if you'd come out the least bit hurt—or worse, not come out at all—well, I don't know if I could've killed the dude, but I would've chopped him up into kindling!"

"But you trusted me," Dipper said, taking her hand. _That means so much to me, Lumberjack Girl._

_Thanks, Big Dipper._

_—And I'm in love with you, too. Movie night next Friday at the Shack?_

_Yeah, dude! Uh—you know my dad and brothers won't be home, don't you? Would you rather, you know, hang out at my place?_

_—Let's do the Shack this time. Because I think I'm ready to give you something. Finally. If I don't lose my nerve._

_Give me something? Dipper—you're not thinking about—no, I see you're not. But what, dude?_

Dipper let go of her hand and kissed her cheek. "It's a surprise. Or I hope it will be. See you tomorrow morning."

"Man, you've got my curiosity up," Wendy said with a grin. "You know I'm gonna keep trying to find out!"

"That's OK," Dipper said. "But this isn't a secret. It's a surprise."

"All right," Wendy said. She hugged him. "I guess we don't have any real secrets from each other, huh?"

"Well—not many," Dipper said. "And it'll be fun sharing them."

One last little peck of a kiss, and then Wendy got into her car, started the engine, and the car rumbled down the driveway. From behind him, Dipper heard laughter spilling out of the Shack, along with the oinks of Waddles and Widdles. The weather had been dry, but when he looked up, he couldn't see any stars—clouds were rolling in. Might be a wet run tomorrow morning.

But he wouldn't mind that, nor would Wendy. They'd run in warm summer rain before. Running in rain made them laugh. Rain washed things clean and brought fresher air. It soaked into the parched and thirsty earth. It swelled the streams and plumped the berries and made things green. Rain brought forth new life.

Life beginning anew would be a great change. Bring on the rain. Maybe it would launch a great week. And at the other end of the week would be Friday, and when Wendy came over on Friday—

_Huh. I'm still scared._

_Oh, well. Deal with it. I just have another bridge to cross, that's all._

Smiling, Dipper walked toward the Shack, toward the light and the life and the laughter.

* * *

 

_The End_


End file.
